Word: bleak
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...last turn on the ramp at the Guggenheim, lined with proud "Zigs" and sprightly "Arcs," Wright's giant skylights loom close above the sculpture, filtering wan daylight through and crushing the mighty works down to an almost puny human scale. But if the ambience seems bleak, it is also strangely appropriate, for Smith's last works were conceived and built in desolation. His second wife had left him in the isolated mountain house, taking with her their two daughters. Visitors, though they revelled in the gourmet meals that the sculptor cooked and joined in the monumental drinking bouts...
...Chinese call it Chen Pao, or Treasure. The Russians call it Damansky. Both claim the tiny, uninhabited island, located in the midst of the frozen Ussuri river that forms the common border of Communism's premier countries. Precisely what happened there last week, in the bleak, snow-swept wilderness of eastern Asia, may never be fully known. Only Moscow has offered the world a reasonably detailed-but doubtless in part self-serving-account. Both Moscow and Peking agree, however, that the violence along the Ussuri was for several hours as close to war as the two countries have come...
Troubled Future. For O'Neill, increasingly isolated within his own party, the future is bleak. There is at least a fair chance that he may lose his post as party chief in the next few weeks. If he retains power, he risks more Catholic civil rights demonstrations unless he pushes for reforms, and action on those reforms almost certainly would bring extremist Protestant rioters to the streets. Continuing unrest might well spur British intervention, which in turn would produce a violent response from a goodly number of Northern Ireland's 1,500,000 people. Indeed, the Marquess...
Draped in the Flag. While Terrence McNally's Next does not have quite the dazzle of Adaptation, it, too, is richly comic and McNally's best play to date. At an antiseptically bleak Army induction center, a potential draftee (James Coco) appears for his physical examination. He is fortyish, fat, balding, and obviously the victim of some computer error. Nonetheless, his examiner (Elaine Shore), a squat female sergeant of stony mien and rigid devotion to the Army manual, proceeds with the examination. In a sequence of mounting hilarity, the thoroughly discomfited Coco is forced to strip down...
...published When She Was Good, a bleak dissection of a smalltown Midwestern termagant without a single Jewish character. It was a long way from Newark and the Jewish milieu, but Roth's ventriloqual genius enabled him to handle the unfamiliar setting with considerable success...