Word: berney
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...wife (Ruth Gorevader; not poor, just going bankrupt don) is a silly woman whose mother-love is gauged in terms of what she can buy her son, whose purpose in life is to get bargains, and whose problems are valued at the going Psychiatric rates. "Me," their son Berney, still wants to "find himself" at twenty-six. He hopes to do this by inspiration rather than work, and by helping humanity instead of making a living...
...tell them to take it (and like it), they might, pardon the expression, rebel. Matters are not helped by Miss Gordon, who exaggerates Rona Halpern beyond the demands of farce, and of Walter Matthau who does nothing but impose a televised quality on the Halpern living room. As Berney, however, Anthony Holland ekes out all the sympathy possible and Lily Darvas is similarly good as the grandmother whom the Halperns briefly tolerate, then ship off to an old-age home...
...subject that Miss Hellman treats with particular humor and good sense is the uneasy relationship between post-ghetto Jews and Negroes. The play opens with Berney singin' on his guitar "De life of a nigger ain't much good..." a point to which the Halpern maid, who overhears him, speaks with some feeling. In a later scene, Berney urges social action on a Negro who mugs him, more or less to shut him up. As these two episodes perhaps suggest, there is considerable overlap in the construction. Since a scene or two might be cut in the process of tightening...
Dark of the Moon isn't the kind of play you run across every day, especially around Harvard. Written in 1945 by two Englishmen, Howard Richardson and William Berney, Dark of the Moon is a rendition of "The Ballad of Barbara Allen," set in the Smoky Mountains. It is the tale of John the Witch Boy's painful struggle to become a human, and of his failure; and the characters are some of the seediest hill folk this side of Tobacco Road...
...facts and handed them over to a federal grand jury. From what the FBI had to say, it was clear that Harold's "cosmic con" signaled the decline of such classic earth-bound dodges as the Gypsy Swindle, Pigeon-Drop, Sick Old Man and Handkerchief Switch. But Spaceman Berney, who has a long record of convictions for embezzlement and fraud, said there had been a terrible misunderstanding. He has never been near Venus, he said. And he doesn't even know any Mr. Ucellus...