Word: beckett
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fascinating account. Ellmann, who died seven months ago of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), was the author of the landmark literary biography James Joyce (1959). In his numerous books and essays he displayed an acute, doctrine-free sensitivity to the many ways that writers such as Yeats, Beckett, Eliot and Auden translate experience into art. In Wilde, Ellmann confronted a somewhat different challenge: an author whose most complex, illustrious accomplishment was the style and content of his own life...
...hard facts with a resonant ring, few can match the one dredged up by Rieff: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot had its U.S. premiere at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in 1956. Quien es Godot? Quien sabe? The play is a masterpiece about waiting and making everything from nothing, a feat, these literary carpetbaggers convince us, that is not uncommon in Miami...
...improved, the Norton Anthology of Pretentious Literature contains twice as much angst and symbolism as the previous edition. More than 1,000 pages of authors overreaching themselves in the quest for metaphysical absolutes: Beckett, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, Doeblin, Ashbury, Joyce and many other favorites of the cafe society...
...lolling his tongue, shouting "Stella!" every fifteen seconds and occasionally spraying the overheated Blanche with a beer. Funny, but the humor fades long before the actors do. Not even the sudden introduction of Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, as well as instant parodies of Mamet and Beckett tossed in like ingredients in Ubu's wild bouillabaise, can save it from ennui. Every now and then, though, Durang's original wit shines through the sledge-hammer production, as when Andreassi suddenly transforms into Brick from Cat: "What happened between Skipper and me was good! It was pure! Okay...
Theatergoers expecting the Next Big Thing out of DeLillo are bound to be disappointed. He is covering ground blazed by Stoppard, Beckett and Pirandello, but he is covering it well. (Interestingly enough, last year was the fiftieth anniversary of the latter's death, and A.R.T.'s artistic director Robert Brustein designed this season as a sort of tribute to Italy's greatest dead playwright...