Word: affair
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dinner. Candice Bergen was always at their house because her best friend was the family baby-sitter. Unfortunately, father Eddie just barely had time to bequeath his eyes and voice to Carrie and sire her brother Todd before he gallivanted off with famous film fatale Elizabeth Taylor. The whole affair ended badly and publicly. As her legacy from the broken fairy-tale family, Carrie got a wounded heart and an emotional predilection for "short Jewish men -- preferably musicians." Eddie's parental abdication left the kids to be raised by their extraordinary mother...
...until Rabbit and his wife, Janice, return home to Pennsylvania that he discovers some nasty truths. Nelson and an accountant dying of AIDS have been stealing money from the family Toyota lot to support their cocaine habits. One of his former lovers dies, and he has an affair with his daughter-in-law. Toyota eventually revokes their contract with the family business, and Rabbit learns that even his small town has to deal with drug problems, the Japanese invasion, and AIDS...
...politics intrudes, he sometimes seems to miss the point. Blumenthal is still at pains to explain Hart's "philosophy" -- something that in the public mind boiled down to little more than unsafe sex -- and he makes no attempt to explain the self-destructive impulses involved in the Donna Rice affair. Similarly, Blumenthal accuses the Dukakis campaign of "intellectual" failures, though the Democratic nominee's mistakes mainly involved political, symbolic and emotional lapses...
...only does this unique constraint provide the audience with moments of conspiratorial delight (we know, for example, that Robert has discovered the affair before Jerry knows), but it also invests the final, earliest scene with a sense of pathos that would be absent in a more traditional arranging of the play's events. This affair is, quite literally, doomed from the start, and the convincing passion which Ducey and Cottingham demonstrate in the play's final scenes elicits our sympathy in one of the play's few genuinely touching moments...
Another intriguing aspect of Pinter's script is the various levels at which the characters "betray" each other and their attitudes towards betrayal in general. Kiser's Robert viciously internalizes the bitterness which the affair has engendered in him, but refuses to acknowledge it in himself. He maintains an outwardly stable friendship with Jerry, meeting him regularly for lunch. At the same time, he issues a misogynist tirade about "girl babies" that is a thinly veiled attack on Emma. Kiser's tense, self-controlled performance is inarguably the show's most memorable...