Word: allottments
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...conceivable dramatic calorie count, the plot courts starvation. The setting is a drafty, government-sponsored art studio, a cross between a ratty garret and an army barracks. Several young men and women of working-class origin drift in. Their teacher, Allott (Kevin Conway), has come earlier, as has Stella (Veronica Castang), the nude model. As the students stand at their sketch boards, it is quickly apparent that they are wholly inept and could not tell Degas from dandruff. They are whiling away the days on a subsidized boondoggle, and for them art is what Writer Rose Macaulay once said...
...boys keep up a sputtering fire of obscene expletives, raw sexual gibes and smutty innuendo. The girls and the model give as good-or as ill-as they get. Allott does not monitor this chatter, but he does deliver scathingly caustic appraisals of each individual's sketches as well as alienating colleagues (Peter de Maio). After Act II gets under way, Allott suggests that he might take the place of the model for a while. Before he does anything about it, one of the randier boys begins stripping, grabs the model, pins her down and rapes her before...
Quasi-Warhol. During the play, Allott has issued a kind of quasi-Warhol manifesto that the plastic arts are exhausted and that the truly contemporary artist must orchestrate an "event" out of the materials immediately at hand. In that light, Allott may be seen to have orchestrated the specific mood that precipitated the rape, thus fashioning his own particular happening. On another level, Allott has expressed such acid contempt of his brush-wielding anthropophagi that the rape could conceivably symbolize the crude assault that some sad creature might make on a subject that he is totally incapable of mastering, either...
...Because Allott's role is an in-depth version of the central figure of Butley, which appeared on Broadway two years ago, and since Britain's Alan Bates played both roles with scapular authority, one fears for Kevin Conway even as one scrutinizes him. But he is up to his hazardous task. As an actor, he is not a flashy water-skier splashing off extraneous effects but a deep-sea diver of strenuous gravity who comes up with the pearl of truth...
...Smith, Allott, Miller and others were retired, the Republicans suffered a net loss of two seats, and the new line-up of 57 to 43 will give the President an upper chamber somewhat more liberal?and potentially more hostile ?than its predecessor. It will also contain a goodly number of new faces (see following story...