Word: banally
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Glass Tear. The show begins amid the banal frivolity of a beer party. A group of the Grey Lady's giddy friends have come in to guzzle Budweiser and Ballantine's ale. These are not puppets, but men and women wearing decadent, citified masks. At the sound of a funeral chime, which is actually two lead pipes clanged together by the agent of fate at the side of the stage, the beer cans are whisked away. The guests leave and the stage is occupied by a puppet father and mother and a masked...
...Dick Gibson Show, like Portnoy's Complaint, contains enough comic material for a dozen nightclub acts. Yet it is considerably more than an entertainment. The banal and the profound, the vulgar and the touching, are humanely juggled into a vital blur-a brilliant approximation of what it is like to live with one's eyes and ears constantly open...
...your own mind's eye, banal as the image might be, you are a marionette, and the voice in the center of the circle is pulling the strings that move your limbs. You feel the force of your own movement, but also that you have no control. The sensation is not entirely unpleasant, that feeling of temporary subjugation, also provoked by, say, Kuntsler or Jagger or a woman named Cynthia you knew when you were fourteen, who captivated everyone at your parents' parties and finally killed herself with booze and pills...
...sensual turns into contempt. When we should feel pity, we feel disgust. At one point in an English gaming room, Archie finds himself with a repulsively ugly English society woman who won't let him walk away. The scene is utterly gratuitous, and Cassavetes is using the perversely banal to make cheap jokes. To present the underside of bourgeois respectability, he deliberately cultivates the unattractive...
Most of us harbor the secret suspicion that the drama of private lives is, ultimately, uninteresting. Our personal hypotheses about reality run to the banal, our lives are filled with tedious things, and our hopes to discover startling significances amid the mundane are usually, simply, silly. So instead of introspecting, we look wide-eyed toward realistic art to tell us how a trip to the Stop and Shop, an unpaid Coop bill, and a headache constitute meaningful experience...