Word: bench
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...park bench, one white and one black, sit swapping stories. No premise could be simpler, no setting more static. But because the theater is ultimately a medium of language, of narrative, a skilled playwright can find in just such a conversation all the action an audience needs. The result can be poignant and elegiac, like David Storey's Home, or salty and burlesque, like David Mamet's Duck Variations, or full of rage and silences, like many of Beckett's dramas...
Herb Gardner, author of the 1962 A Thousand Clowns, is the laureate of losers who wage hopeless battles while cracking jokes. He celebrates fighting the system as the way to keep the soul alive. So when he puts two old men on a bench in I'm Not Rappaport, it is not surprising that they are engaging codgers, inspired liars, tattered but gallant knights-errant. They take on the muggers, the drug dealers, the authorities who impose mandatory retirement, all without moving more than a few feet from the bench. Their skirmishes are uproarious. What gives the play...
...Cornerback Johnny Sample pressed a personal grudge and won a private Super Bowl, but he lost something too. Sample recalls, "At one point I jumped on [Colts Running Back] Tom Matte out of bounds. He didn't do much after that." Another time, "momentum carried me into the Colts' bench and I got slugged with six or seven helmets." Other raps were to come. Not surprisingly, football had nothing for him after his playing career ended within a year. "I'd hoped to coach," says Sample, 48, "but the only letter I could bring myself to write wasn't answered...
Presiding over this to-hell-with-you hullabaloo is Judge Marie Lambert, a seasoned New York City politician who runs her surrogate's courtroom with a singular feistiness. "Will someone turn the lights on back there?" she hollered one morning last week after taking the bench. "This place looks like a funeral parlor." A joke about funeral parlors during the biggest inheritance case in state history? It may be that for Lambert, a self-proclaimed defender of widows and orphans, this case arraying one against the other is a test of her emotional fortitude. She had frequent run-ins last...
...genial, 6’3 Minnesotan has a lot on his mind—and a lot of bench time to think about...