Word: auden
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...been stringing Borges along for more than 25 years now and everyone knows it. If I were Mike Barnicle, I'd call that the mark of bunich of human dirt bags (I wish I had said that to start with it miglior fabbro to you, Mr. Barnicle). They let Auden slip by, they jet Joyce slip by, I hope they don't let Borges go the same route...
Alex (Jon Voight) wears a white suit with more creases in it than W.H. Auden's face. He drives a Rolls-Royce that pants and sputters like a dray mare about to be shot. He vamps his way through calamities all of his own devising with a bad little boy's giggle at just how cute he is. He is not cute, not charming, not nearly substantial enough for a comedy about high rollers in Vegas. Alex bravadoes himself into the Dr. Zhivago Suite at the MGM Grand Hotel with his friend Jerry (Burt Young), who plays Oscar...
Luckily, Rausch edits most of the didactic verse--such as Auden's version of T.S. Eliot's conclusion to The Wasteland (Auden: "Repent... Unite ... Act"), or his awkwardly Marxist closing line: "To each his need, from each his power." Rauch leaves in those speeches pointing to the concerns more relevant to his summer audience: "Take sex, for instance... Sometimes it's funny and sometimes it's said, but it's always hanging about like a smell of drains...
This perhaps is best taken and clung to as the focal point of the play: the particularly modern form of personal inauthenticity, of plastic and degrading relationships, of--yes, once again--alienation. Rauch obliterates most of the political alienation which Auden ties to the malaise of the individual. The director instand emphasizes the distorted manner in which the Victorian sexual logacy has been incorporated into...
...Francis Crewe makes an entrance, and we see the beginnings of the first real relationship for the hand-holding Alan Norman. The emotions Rauch creates with this interaction are probably not opposed to those intended by Auden and Isherwood. Unfortunately, however, the lack of personal understanding we have for Alan Norman's fall or for his relationship with Crewe stems not from the acting or the directing, but from the play itself...