Word: aunt
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...subject of his epic is the legacy of slavery, yet the plays teem with vibrant, idiosyncratic, fully imagined characters who are never reduced to political placards. The plays are realistic, even old-fashioned, in style but sprinkled with mysticism and magic: ghosts, visions, seers and a matriarchal figure named Aunt Ester, who recurs throughout the series and lives to the age of 366. With their poetic, often meandering dialogue, the plays typically start slow (anyone who says his eyes have never drooped in the first act of an August Wilson play probably isn't being honest), but build to thrilling...
...push ahead of him in line, he might offer to hold your briefcase. He is, in short, the round little guy with the slightly comical face you have seen in such movies as Manhattan and Lovesick, and he almost apologizes for having written Off-Broadway's newest hit, Aunt Dan & Lemon. "At the risk of sounding self-pitying, the project taxed my resources to the limit and sometimes beyond," he says. "It took more brains than I had, and to figure out how to write it, I had to borrow some of next year's brains and the next year...
...fact, if Aunt Dan had been dismissed, as were most of his previous efforts, he might have abandoned the theater altogether. "I just don't think I can write a better play than this one," he says. But how could such a pleasant person write a drama that is at once so unpleasant and annoying, yet so provocative that half of New York seems to be waiting to get into the Public Theater? The answer is that, like many moralists with a pen, Shawn has set off a verbal time bomb, mostly in a series of monologues in which...
Lemon (Kathryn Pogson) is a neurotic young Englishwoman who sits in her London flat reading about the Nazis, whom she admires, and musing over her childhood, which was dominated by Aunt Dan (Linda Hunt), a slightly sinister friend of her parents. Aunt Dan, it turns out, is crazy, but crazy in the way some people are at cocktail parties; she is able to find a plausible argument for almost any evil that governments commit, and she has turned Lemon into her philosophical clone. "Lemon presents the justification for pure selfishness," says Shawn, "even for sadistic murder. The question is raised...
...filth, so they could not cry for help. Sometimes the buried survivors were still locked in gruesome embrace with the dead. One was Omaira Sanchez, 13, who remained up to her neck in ooze two days following the disaster. When the mudslide struck, Omaira was washed up against her aunt, who grabbed hold of her. The aunt died, but kept her grip, even after rigor mortis had set in. Finally, after rescuers worked fruitlessly for 60 hours, Omaira died of a heart attack. In the days after the disaster, one doctor estimated that there were at least 1,000 living...