Word: adroit
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Good Men is at least as good a play as The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which it resembles. The production is adroit, and its subject -- the degree to which the military is properly subordinate to civilian values -- has never ceased to be topical. But it suffers from bad timing. Plays that are in essence debates need each side to be able to make a reasonable case. In this conflict between career military "defenders" and soon-to-be-civilian attorneys over the rights of the accused, the imbalance is not in the play but in the minds of audiences. The flood...
...longer did Wilder risk racial polarization by talking about putting prejudice to the test. Now 58, his hair silver, his manner reassuring and his smile infectious, Wilder had grown far too adroit to speak of racial issues in anything other than soft, almost dulcet, tones. Throughout the 1980s, Wilder had consciously shaped his persona to make his blackness and ground-breaking achievements seem almost boring and quietly inevitable. He did not disown his racial identity, tossing off laugh lines like, "How can I not think of myself as a black man? I shave." His style, rather, was to envelop...
NICE WORK by David Lodge (Viking; $18.95). A funny, adroit novel about an executive in one of Britain's rust-belt factories and the feminist lecturer who does field research on his old-fashioned methods...
...English movies of the '80s had a team like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, David Lodge's funny, adroit Nice Work would make an ideal vehicle for them. The novel's protagonist, Vic Wilcox, is a gruff but keen-witted exec struggling to turn around a laggard steel-parts factory in Rummidge -- "an imaginary city," the author informs us, "which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world." Vic's antagonist (and here the term is literal) is Robyn Penrose, an attractive, rigorously feminist lecturer...
What really distinguished the Soviet move was its adroit timing. It came just a day before George Bush was to deliver his first major speech on U.S.-Soviet relations and 18 days before a NATO summit meeting at which the alliance will be hard pressed to heal the U.S.-West German split over SNF negotiations. Moscow moved swiftly, and with apparent success, to keep the rift open. Shevardnadze used a scheduled trip to Bonn Friday afternoon for meetings with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher to tout the Soviet proposal. He added a touch of salt...