Word: alphabetic
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...outset, Androcles' name in Greek-alphabet capitals hovers over the stage. A yellow scrim hangs in front, with sunflowers traced on it. As Tharon Musser's lighting changes, suggestions of a lion's head appear; and shortly some slinky jazz with a perky clarinet over a tonic-dominant ostinato ushers in the Lion (Ted Graeber) with a lioness (Jane Farnol). The two animals perform a semidance pantomime, until the Lion gets rid of his partner. Shaw's script calls for no lioness, but this seems a quite acceptable bit of directorial padding. When alone, the Lion does some pushups, indulges...
...second matter involves certain provisions of Shaw's will. Shaw left the largest fortune of any dramatist in history. Having long been vitally interested in language, pronunciation, and script, he specified that most of his estate be used to seek out and promote a more efficient British alphabet of at least 40 letters; and that, when such an alphabet was found, a parallel edition of Androcles and the Lion be published with the traditional and the new, phonetic alphabet on opposite pages...
...agreement from the three residuary legatees, and a public competition was announced. Of the 467 entries, four were judged worthy of sharing the prize money. The design finally adopted, however--an ingeniously logical and space-saving system of 48 characters--was largely that of Kingsley Read. And the bi-alphabetic edition of Androcles was duly published in 1962. Whether the Shaw Alphabet achieves widespread use remains to be seen...
...movement began simultaneously in Europe and Brazil in the early 1950s, and has now washed up in the U.S. Its antecedents go all the way back to prehistoric picture writing, with such variations along the way as the anagrams of early Christian monks, Apollinaire's Calligrammes, and the alphabet drawings of Painter Paul Klee. According to concretism's boosters, it has attracted scores of practitioners-designers, architects, mathematicians, composers, communications theorists-everybody, it would seem, but poets. The goal, explains Concretist Ronald Gross, is "poetry designed to appeal to the eye as well as to the heart...
...time, cuts sound--dialogue and music--clear, straight-forward. But sound too serves the ambiance of Dream which Desire seeks to recreate. The six bits of dialogue don't untangle the plot or deepen the characters. After all, the vocabulary of the subconscious does not use any known alphabet, although one suspects that music is our best approximation. No, this dialogue merely suggests the too easily forgotten gap between what a person says and what he is. Nothing Anastasia could say would do credit to her presence; thankfully, she says nothing. She is addressed once, but the response comes from...