Word: birthday
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...BIRTHDAY PARTY, by Harold Pinter, is a 1958 play written prior to The Caretaker and The Homecoming. Party lacks the dramatic sophistication of tone, tempo and themes of the two later plays; yet the telltale stigmata are all here-dread, panic, menace, mocking comic absurdity, the evasive unwillingness of people to level with each other. Except for Edward Flanders, the American cast is often blunt and plodding when it should be sardonic, cutting and athletic, but Pinter nevertheless provides prickly excitement and a tantalizing quota of questions without answers...
...BIRTHDAY PARTY, by Harold Pinter. In a season that began with unqualified disasters, this is the first qualified success. A 1958 play written prior to The Caretaker and The Homecoming, Party lacks the dramatic sophistication of tone, tempo and themes of the two later plays. Yet the telltale stigmata are all here-dread, panic, menace, mocking comic absurdity, the evasive unwillingness of people to level with each other. Except for Edward Flanders, the American cast is blunt and plodding when it should be sardonic, cutting and athletic, but Pinter provides prickly excitement and a tantalizing quota of questions without answers...
...Sandy is committing slow alcoholic suicide, shot by shot, and is barred from her young son as an unfit mother. The man (William Daniels) has an even more guilt-ridden tale. In the driveway to his home, he ran over his own child on the boy's fifth birthday, and has been fleeing from the memory ever since...
Instead, most begin by floridly invoking the help of what at least one refers to as "the Great Legislator of the Universe." From there, they wander. A wordy example is Louisiana's 1,000-page backbreaker, which gets into such minute areas as declaring Huey Long's birthday forever a legal holiday. Georgia's offers $250,000 to the state's first discoverer of oil. California's exempts from taxation certain "fruit- and nutbearing trees under the age of four years." Such details belong in the statutory code, not the constitution...
...only when the French government staged its mammoth 1966 Paris retrospective in honor of his 85th birthday (TIME Dec. 2), that Picasso agreed to let his own private sculpture trove be used to supplement the few Picasso sculptures available from other owners. Subsequently, Sir Roland Penrose, author of a biography of Picasso, prevailed on him to let the sculpture travel on to London's Tate Gallery this summer. Last week Americans got their chance to see what all the excitement was about when 290 pieces, selected by Sir Roland, went on view at Manhattan's Museum of Modern...