Word: azaleas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...life may be, Daisy is determined to keep on painting until she gets it right. Having one clear goal in a sea of unpredictablity becomes a theme throughout the rest of the play. After Daisy's monologue, a customer named Jane (Dani D. Krasner '97) and her daughter Azalea (Phoebe Search '00) enter for lunch--the first time they've spent together in a long while. From the start, the tension between them is evident, and the immediate familiarity of the characters and their conflict is perhaps the most effective aspect of the play...
...spinster-like divorcee, brimming with outwardly cheerful criticisms of her daughter's college antics that fail to show her daughter that she does in fact care about her welfare. Her verbal shots are accompanied by jerky, robotic gestures that reveal an underlying tension but are somewhat artificial and unconvincing. Azalea is the flowering know-it-all. Stubborn and unreceptive to motherly advice, she snaps defensively in response to every comment. She is a liberated student who savors the right to drink a glass of wine at lunch, if only for the shock value it has in startling her mother...
...mother versus daughter motif continues until a crucial fact suddenly comes to light that bridges the conflict and brings the two to reconciliation. It becomes apparent that Azalea resembles her mother as she was at that age: impulsive, free-spirited and committed to one thing despite all the uncertainty of youth. For Azalea at this point, it is discovering herself. For Jane, it was motherhood. Their dialogue usually seems genuine, though occasional lapses in acting quality compromise the exchange's spontaneity...
...season of ennui and loathing. Pundits exhausted their thesauruses in the search for new synonyms for doleful, dreary and vacuous. Ordinary folks made the classic finger-in-throat gesture, or pitched forward face first into their azalea beds. On the cover of the Nation, presidential history was depicted as a Darwinian descent from the triumphantly upright Franklin Roosevelt on down to an invertebrate Clinton-Dole level just above the primordial scum...
...ritual redemption in the poetic finale, but the dominant moods are treachery, betrayal, revenge and greed. The most beautiful words spoken are about the few hundred acres of land on which all the action unfolds -- so ablaze in spring that one character equates Moses' burning bush with a scarlet azalea -- yet it ends up despoiled and abandoned, wanted by no one save for the coal that lies beneath, and that can be reached only by scraping away the last remnants of soil, life and growth...