Word: anguish
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...That is Clarke's job. But before she answers, I hope she understands that the anger and disappointment that will no doubt be directed at her by Jews and others on this campus are not outbursts of gratuitous hostility toward her community, but are rather expressions of hurt and anguish over the loss of what might have been between...
...John, William Macy is outstanding. Struggling along with the audience to understand his woman, it is easy to feel his anguish. Having collaborated with Mamet for twenty five years, he seems to identify with every nuance of the character. The script is less kind to Deborah Eisenstadt. She is forced to play two completely different women while somehow relating them. I'm not sure that even Mery Streep could have succeeded in this task. Eisenstadt can hardly be at fault for failing to make this character believable...
...racial shuffling is just one of Sellars' liberties. The stage is furnished with little but office furniture, while video screens simulcast the actors in close-up during their monologues (and, in between, display seemingly unrelated Southern California scenes, from gardens and swimming pools to the L.A. riots). Cries of anguish come from the clowns, and the playfully romantic final scene, in which Portia teases Bassanio for giving away her ring to the lawyer she played in disguise, is reimagined as the darkest, most poisonously unsettling passage in the play...
...emotional climax is the old woman's almost heartbreaking cry of despair in the penultimate scene: "I'm 66 years old, and I don't know what the purpose of it all was. An endless, endless struggle. And for what? For what?" Don't look for cries of existential anguish in today's prime-time dramas, where every story must be uplifting, and even bad things teach good people heartening lessons. The Mother is dated, all right; it's television for grownups...
This is death to Cheever, whose nobility as a writer was in saving his characters from stereotype; he elevated the trials of those gray-flannel souls to a kind of sanctified anguish. He saw them from the inside. And because he was a sensualist in describing people who thought it their sad destiny to be prim, Cheever was able to create a kind of lyric poetry about the things he loved: the forced intimacy of Manhattan foot traffic, a beach house at midnight, the fidelity in a cocker spaniel's tilted glance, the tenseness in a young wife's posture...