Word: architects
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...disaffected liberal's belief in the strength of the darker side of human nature. Benefactors is foremost a comedy, albeit a disillusioned one, and it makes its statements with jokes. In the shrewdest of them, the nurse, the one character who is not a university graduate, recognizes the architect's walled-in housing proposal as a variation of a college, turning its back on the rest of the world. Hurt's performance in the role, tinged equally with self-pity and pluck, is the production's strongest. Close impeccably portrays a woman whose compassion leads her into ruinous contradictions. Waterston...
...work; each has found his own version of the script's meaning. Some saw it as portraying the death of liberalism, others as a comment on the unworkability of democracy. In London, it was widely viewed as a social satire about the professional classes: its self-deluding hero, an architect planning high-rise public housing, seeks to tear down as unlivable a neighborhood of row houses very much like his own. The play's structure--overlapping reminiscences and flashbacks--suggests the unattainability of objective truth and the aching burden of memory. Frayn does not fault the re viewers. "I know...
Critics who saw both have generally preferred the London production, but Frayn seems to favor the Broadway rendition, starring Sam Waterston as the architect and Glenn Close as his wife. "This version brings out more strongly the feelings and relationships of the characters," Frayn notes, "and also the narrative. That has something to do with the audience. Americans seem much more amused by the twists and turns of the plot." This emphasis on emotion marks a deliberate departure from Frayn's customarily wry, bemused tone. He explains, "All humorous writing is detached. What makes it comic is a refusal...
...both an accumulation of the columnist's ideas and of his being; he is his collected works. More: he has shown that collecting the works is the way a life ought to be built, column by column, displaying both continuity and changes in the structure and in the architect. He has shown the way to make and use a mind...
...modest circumstances. The son of a seamstress and coffee-factory worker, he graduated from a commercial high school and went on to earn a degree in political science at the University of Lund in 1958. With Palme, Carlsson became a political protégé of Prime Minister Tage Erlander, the architect of the Swedish welfare state. His first major post was as Minister of Education in the government formed by Prime Minister Palme in 1969. Carlsson served Palme until his death, acting as his personal deputy and attending to the mundane details of political life that did not interest his boss...