Word: alchemist
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...first but soon makes one feel teased and irritated. The stories glimmer with promise and technical polish and they dazzle for a minute--but suddenly one suspects that it's all a false promise and the real thing has been forsaken for the fool's gold of the alchemist. Mark Helprin's intriguing short stories simply fail to transmute into any sort of remedy for a passed-out art form...
...door to Albertus' cell at the Dominican monastery in Cologne, asked visitors what they wanted and even engaged them in polite conversation. The end of the legend was that Albertus' celebrated pupil, Thomas Aquinas, smashed the robot to pieces because he considered it demonic. The Swiss alchemist Paracelsus, who was himself considered rather demonic, gave lectures on the creation of a homunculus and even offered a recipe of ingredients, including human blood and putrefied semen. In 16th century Prague, too, the devout Rabbi Judah Loew was reported to have created out of clay a giant robot known...
...dawn, the tarantula twosome slithers, separately, into the bedroom of Malcolm and Kate, and on encountering a rickety desk that Malcolm has spent all night assembling, Trevor, with one helping touch, reduces it to a pile of kindling. Ayckbourn is an alchemist of incipient disaster, and his absurdist humor cuts through the veneer of domestic tranquillity with a serrated edge. Yet his surgery is oddly healing, a kind of revelation through copious laughter and minimal malice...
...time, plague was in the air, and the death of kings implied an unimaginable catastrophe. Racism and superstition prevailed. Occupations that are now obsolete dot his plays: cooper, wheelwright, alchemist, bellman. His language glitters with marvelous words that have, alas, also become obsolete: porpentine (porcupine); swound (faint); german (akin); caitiff (wretch); borthens (the hair of corpses); grise (a stair); bisson (blind). However immortal, Shakespeare, no less than Aristophanes or Mozart, needs his modern interpreters...
...Alchemist. The classic by Shakespeare's rival Ben Jonson. Presented by the MIT Dramashop at MIT Kresge Auditorium Little Theatre, February 13 and 14, at 8 p.m. Tickets...