Word: balme
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...imagine such a beast, such a beast, such a hybrid of music and cacophony, of art and sleaze, of brilliance and banality, then you have some idea of what Lanford Wilson's Balm in Gilead is like...
...Balm in Gilead continually invites these musical analogies, even down to Wilson's ironic use of a title of an old spiritual for the play's title. The Alley Theater takes the analogy one step further with Emery Davis' score, itself a mixture of various musical styles, which plays in the background during the entire show...
...INTO Balm's society of antisocials, whose only law is "me first" stumble two comparatively well-off and friendly misfits. Joe (C.J. Nolan) is a middle-class hustler looking for a piece of the drug-pushing action, and Darlene (Jacqueline Grad) is a woman unaccustomed to the "big city" (she's from Chicago) who is looking for an office job. It is no surprise that they are attracted to each other, and their relationship, though there is not enough compassion or love in it to call it a romance, offers the only hope in the play that anyone will overcome...
Today's jaded audiences may not find Balm as shocking as did those who saw it when the then unknown Wilson first produced it in 1965. Still, the Alley Theater production commands attention because, at its best, it displays the sweep and energy of a symphony orchestra--or perhaps the Mahavishnu Orchestra. At its least, Balm in Gilead is an entertaining evening of voyeurism, a chance to go slumming without going farther than Inman Square...
...however, I must tell you that both theories are false, as is every other afterlife ever conceived by the mind of man. Death does not involve angels, or houris, or ace bandages (well, perhaps ace bandages--more on this later). Nor does it have anything to do with trumpets, balm of Gilead, Nirvana, or Kama Sutra. Death is lying on the unyielding floor of the Dunster House dining hall with an itchy nose, worrying about being stepped...