Word: beckett
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...commend Yale athletic director Tom Beckett for his ambition in scheduling his team for a road game at powerhouse Connecticut. Of course, the Elis (3-4) had no business stepping on the court with the nation's No. 8 team, and it showed, as the Huskies cruised to a 93-66 victory Friday...
...rather die, Keaton fingers the corners of his mouth into an awful grimace. But this blank visage was a versatile comic instrument. The giant eyes spoke all manner of emotions: ardor, terror, despair, sheer mulishness. The Keaton deadpan is stoic, heroic and as thoroughly modernist as a Beckett play or a Bauhaus facade. Next to him, Chaplin is a Victorian coquette, Lloyd a glad-handing politician...
...quality this year is as uneven as it was under the Menotti regime -- ranging from the spectacular (Irish actor Barry McGovern in I'll Go On, a mordant one-man show derived from three novels by Samuel Beckett) to the mediocre (Hans Werner Henze's tired exercise in late-'50s avant-gardism, Der Prinz von Homburg) to the risible (the washed-up soprano Renata Scotto singing the role of the Marschallin in Richard Strauss's opera Der Rosenkavalier). Still, Spoleto seems on course to become one of the nation's most important and enjoyable arts events...
Much is made of Nauman's use of words. His slogans--EAT AND DIE, TOUCH AND LIVE, HATE AND DIE and so on, done in flashing neon--are laconic, all right, but Beckett and Wittgenstein they're not, though the co-curator, Robert Storr, tries stubbornly to argue otherwise. Such eminent names--and Alain Robbe-Grillet's too--function as votive tin cans hung on the tree of Nauman's reputation, enhancing the piety with which one is meant to approach...
...creating the atmosphere of alienation and strain, Matteau initially relies on a kind of Beckett-like taciturnity that is only occasionally successful. The way the characters repeat and echo one another's short, cryptic statements--"I'm tapped out," "I can't"--is intended to be disturbing but the rhythm of these sections is off, often falling into a singsong that destroys the intended effect. The style is further undermined by the fact that Flee's valley-girl drawl, while effective for the character, is to mindless and unsympathetic to carry the evocative overtones that this kind of dialogue obviously...