Word: andres
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...like a child. It was one of the master's few unoriginal remarks Virginia Woolf, rereading Nicholas Nickleby in 1939, noted."Dickens owes his astonishing power to make characters alive to the fact that he saw them as a child sees them." And in his 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, André Breton declared, "Childhood is the nearest to true life...
...Manhattan restaurant, a round, balding actor-playwright named Wallace Shawn sits down to dinner with a lean, overarticulate theatrical director named André Gregory. The friends have not seen one another for some years mostly because Gregory has spent that time searching the world for transcendental experiences. He has been to adult play groups in Poland, Scotland, Tibet, the Sahara-and Montauk Point. It is a measure of what is wrong with this movie (and maybe with the culture of the '80s) that neither man sees anything funny about the intrusion of that last prosaic place on this otherwise...
...they have are politely put. Shawn seeks a certain comfort in routine; Gregory obviously seeks the intensification of experience that can result from a daily questioning of one's routines. Neither wants to pick a fight or, for that matter, make a convert. At most, it would seem, André wants to make certain that his odyssey was not in vain, that he learned something for his trouble. And, it must be said, there are several anecdotes that are not without interest in the retell ing, one or two observations about the ways of the world that are acute...
...conception My Dinner with André is interesting in a kind of off-off Broadway way. One can imagine trendy New York twittering about it for weeks - well, any way, days. And if the protagonists were, by nature, men of Shavian wit and intellectual range it might have worked. But they are merely fake profound, in the show biz manner. Their pose may be antitheatrical, but the pair are, in fact, theatrical in the very worst, or drama student, sense of the term...
Wallace and André, in short, are two Woody Allen characters in need of an intelligently ironic author to deflate them. Since he is no where to be found, audiences are advised to bring along their do-it-yourself satire kits...