Word: aimless
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...already a big draw. It may also trouble some older admirers. Ever since his Asian Figures (1973), a collection of sayings from the Korean, Philippine, Chinese and Japanese, Merwin's imagination has been racing eastward. The effect on his poetry is often a studied inscrutability-purposeful but somehow aimless journeys through a landscape of clouds and mountains. Some of his poems seem like private mantras: "Dark rain at/ winter solstice/ and in the morning/ rosemary under clear sky/ bird on south doorstep/ poised like a stone...
These fantasized societies are huge machines with no purpose but their own preservation. The people who comprise the mechanism have lost all individual sense of purpose. They only have direction if they accept a job and a place in their society--a role in keeping the aimless device in perpetual motion. Lem's joke is so big that it sucks in human effort and wastes lives. His punch line is the pain of purposelessness...
...problem with The President, however, is not really the actors. Nor does it lie with rookie director Giselle Falkenberg, although her obvious inexperience shows through in the blocking and seemingly aimless way in which the actors deliver their lines. Given better material to work with, it seems possible that the same crew could have come up with a decent production, but the play itself is so bad that any chance of a good production is precluded. One must wonder why anyone would want to produce this play, and why it was selected by the Harvard Dramatic Club...
Burgess manages to tie all the sprawling strands together in the last few chapters of the novel; by then, however, the aimless nature of the book has defeated the reader. Burgess' merry-go-round theory--keep the plot moving, change the characters--leaves Beard's Roman Women without much in the way of continuity except the grinning Grim Reaper...
Fortunately for director Ralph Gibson and the audience, the Leverett House production features a cast of talented musical-comedy actors and actresses who manage to keep the aimless plot amusing. Although Burnett's humor set the pace in the original production, Harriet Mermes's appealingly Klutzy and earthy Winifred does not carry the show. Mermes's best moment occurs in the second act, when she has the stage to herself as she attempts to fall asleep. She yawns and stretches and mugs her way to bed only to be foiled by the pea under her mattresses...