Word: banter
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Each person is a likely candidate to be dropped from the team, for reasons ranging from the player's age to a recent slump. During the performance, which spans "The Kid's" pitching debut, the actors constantly banter back and forth about which one will be cut. Through the funny repartee, that ranges from self-criticism to denigration, the Los Angeles-based playwright raises his characters from stereotypes to more complex figures...
...verbal jabbing, backstabbing and competition, the players, teammates for the past six years, realize that their jobs are not what they're going to miss most about being cut. Instead, not too surprisingly and too cliched, they are going to miss each other. When the moralizing commences and the banter begins to lose its freshness, sometime mid-way through the second act, the play starts to drag...
...Carre excels at depicting this multitier personality. The most convincing dinner-party chatter, pillow talk and professional banter conceal howling secrets. Magnus' deepest one is that he is a double agent, a fact that becomes apparent about the same time readers realize they have fallen through the civilized surface of the novel. Betrayal comes naturally to Pym, himself the victim of bad faith and disappointments, revealed in flashbacks of youth, student days and beginnings as an operative...
...events, particularly by the supporting female characters, are all wonderfully delivered in the distinctive style of PBS documentaries. Tempo is well controlled in a play whose tempo comprises half of its humor, from the saltry, seductive delivery of Marxist-Leninist philosophy to the back and forth of limmerick-style banter. Nothing is really seriously screwed...
...other couples in love do not engage in such flirtatious banter. That's because these college students are already engaged. At Harvard. Literally, the soon-to-be-married...