Word: bogosian
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...thwarted longing for her father's esteem, from the Los Angeles riots to personal calamities of illness and grief. Actors vary from the well-established (Redgrave, three-time Tony Award winner Irene Worth and Regina Taylor of TV's I'll Fly Away) to the + succes d'estime (Eric Bogosian, Anna Deavere Smith) to the yearning-for- discovery (Sherry Glaser, Claudia Shear, Barnaby Spring). Some play a multitude of characters, some just one, and several basically play themselves. Some, like Spalding Gray, who in January finished a return engagement on Broadway and is coming back in June, devote themselves principally...
...Eric Bogosian's fierce satire is edged with mid-life lament...
...subtlest and most daring, Eric Bogosian, does that and more. A sometime playwright, he creates characters related by theme, in skits that never peter out. At his fiercest, he confronts audiences with the daily ugliness they try to screen out, from deranged bums urinating in the subway to drug freaks convinced that violence is the answer, whatever the question is, to smug suburban successes siring second families who want only to forget their offspring from Wife...
...radio host musing over whether America was really better and happier in the '50s than today, or merely more self-deceiving. It ends with a middle-aged man confronting medical and moral decay. In between, it depicts rage between the accomplished and the envious, each side etched in acid. Bogosian is politically incorrect enough to play an unappetizing street black, arrogant enough to enact an egomaniacal fan and complex enough to risk a jolting tirade against "starving Africans" who, by their unsettling omnipresence on the evening news, "spoil everything." This rant is at once a wail over injustice...
...Bogosian and Finley sometimes strike so hard and so brutally that the social criticism can be self-defeating, making its audience feel distant rather than implicated and aroused to action. But they show us the selves we'd often rather not see, and make us acutely aware of the cost of any level of denial. One of Bogosian's characters scoffs, "the world is a complicated place and trying to understand it ain't gonna make it any less complicated." Trying to understand the world Finley and Bogosian confront us with may not make our lives any less complicated...