Word: anguishingly
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Unfortunately, Walter LaFeber's Inevitable Revolutions does little to relieve this sense of anguish. Barraging the reader with too many unimportant names and dates, the book describes two centuries of U.S. involvement in Central America with the depth of a high school textbook. Although LaFeber outlines and criticizes the major currents behind U.S. policy he offers no escape from the not-so-merry-go-round in Central America at a time when alternatives are needed most...
Perhaps if Julian Lowenfeld as Serge could express overpowering impatience, anguish, and self-doubt (the three emotions the playwright relies on), we might take the shaky underpinnings of the play on faith. But though Lowenfeld is intermittently believable, he has an unfortunate habit of substituting decibels for modulations in expression and timbre. His loud rages are contrived rather than compelled: Gabriel, rocking silently in his chair, is the more effective emblem of the family's failure to communicate without hurting. As Monique says after Serge has thoughtlessly ignored her: "That's the first thing we should learn in life...
...Roof let the words of their characters speak for themselves, and by doing so they arouse our fascination in their relationships. Under the brilliant direction of Kevin Jennings, the actors submerge themselves in the plot and use the sharply vivid language to reveal their characters' mental anguish and desperate attempts at making some sense of their lives. Mounted in the small, dimly lit Dunster Junior Common Room, the play is set on the same level as the audience. The proximity of the actors to the audience is mentally as well as physically intimate. Jennings has merged the play's three...
...makes the paper beneath it look brown. But almost everything else functions well in Richler's idiosyncratic, exuberant and welcome volume. What does not work is a steady insistence that humorists are a devalued species. In fact they enjoy unique privileges: they can mock the powerful, conceal anguish with a joke and enjoy an afterlife in the pages of anthologies. Small wonder that no one takes their complaint seriously. They themselves have made it laughable...
...expectations of discomfort, danger and the constant threat of death, he dares harbor only one decent hope: that in some unlikely 250th or 500th of a second his shutter will open and shut and almost by accident freeze an image that will make some human sense out of the anguish to which he is the world's paid witness...