Word: asylums
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...perhaps the most riveting and outrageous, as he takes both of his characters, Grass in the first act and the nebbishy Freddy of Act Two, to the edge and beyond. Nevertheless, the play never loses balance because DeLillo has spread out hilarious lines quite evenly among his insane asylum inmates. Derrah and Geidt start off by creating an atmosphere of subdued surrealism that clues us in to the weirdness ahead. As a human television in Act Two, Derrah switches channels effortlessly. Sitting to the side, looking straight ahead, and wrapped in a straitjacket, he transfers his voice with manic precision...
While The Day Room can be faulted for what it tries to be, it cannot be faulted for its ultimate success--as a clever, witty series of surprises and startling situations. Larger issues aside, the inhabitants of the asylum and their quest for a better reality make for an intriguing psychological mystery. Gradually the audience realizes that it is witness to an elaborate game; but what kind of game, and who's playing, remain elusive questions...
Quite often the works that seem most "expressionist," the clearest indexes of a mind approaching the end of its tether, are the most tenderly scrupulous in their treatment of fact. One has only to go to Saint-Remy and stand on the edge of the olive grove outside the asylum, looking south toward the chain of limestone hills called the Alpilles, to realize that Van Gogh changed nothing essential in the view when painting Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background in the spring of 1889. The heaving stratification of the limestone, its caverns and holes, and the turbulent...
...watch him shifting gears in the portrait of the elderly head attendant of the asylum, Charles-Elzeard Trabuc, is to receive a vivid lesson in the adjustment of manner to motif. Trabuc's cotton jacket, with its emphatic parallel stripes of blackish-blue, is as explicitly stylized as anything produced within the next quarter-century by Klimt or, for that matter, Miro. But in the head, this graphic energy is subordinated to volume, to the immobile self-containment of a man who, Van Gogh realized, "has seen an enormous amount of suffering and death." The chin and mouth are compressed...
...such portraits, Van Gogh attained the grave humane fullness of his great model Rembrandt; the landscapes are like nothing anyone had painted before. No wonder the little asylum, with its worn flagstone corridors and pine-shadowed garden, remains one of the sacred sites of modernist culture. Here, as in Manet's Paris and Cezanne's Aix-en-Provence, art turned on its pivot in the 19th century to face the 20th. One does not see many exhibitions like this in a lifetime...