Word: brackish
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...arrives on a slave ship 300 years ago, knowing one English word: "Nigger." It is, or might as well be, his New World name. But Niger, the river, is his origin, his blood flow, which Calvin Baker, 24, a writer for PEOPLE magazine, traces through generations to the brackish wash of present time. Naming the New World (St. Martin's Press; 118 pages; $18.95) is a writer's gamble, a brief, fast-changing swirl of prose sketches, prose-poetry, and poetry standing naked. Such a recitation--it could be chanted, to drum beats, in an evening--might dissipate in artiness...
...very slow first act is saved by the fine quality of the acting. E.G. Marshall plays a cranky Jacob Brackish with vigor and sternness. His Brackish is complex enough that you're never quite sure whether he is difficult because he's malicious or just because he has high standards. Maryann Plunkett had the audience laughing at her "wicked cool" Massachusetts accent from the moment she walks onstage. She demonstrates great range as Kathleen Hogan, sometimes crumpled in tears on her bed, other times ironing fanatically or gleefully switching the radio station to rap music when Brackish's hearing...
This American variation on the My Fair Lady story has less of the glamor, but more acute and straight-forward acknowledgements of class constrictions. Gloucester, Mass. is far away from Brackish's Harvard in sensibility if not in miles, and the Hogans don't see much possibility for mobility or escape. It's not clear why Brackish returned to Goucester if he had such grand ambitions, but he too seems resigned to a preordained role: "Gloucester-born, Gloucester-bred, in two or three days, Gloucester-dead," he declares wryly. The sense of place, of stillness and smallness, is reinforced...
Thea Vidale, for example, is a big, boisterous comic with a lot of stage presence -- or, at least, presence over a lot of the stage. Unfortunately, her ABC sitcom, Thea, is a throwback to the broad, brackish family sitcoms of the Good Times ilk: streetwise sass drenched in sentimental mush. John Mendoza, who plays a newly divorced sportswriter in NBC's The Second Half, is a mellower, and less accomplished, performer, who is also defeated by tired gag situations -- the inept single guy who can't furnish an apartment or get a date without stumbling over his feet...
...rebels in Tehran say the fish, buffalo and rice that were the staples of life are gone. They claim the Iraqi army is using poison to kill marsh wildlife, and they show videotapes of hundreds of fish floating belly up on the brackish waters. Emma Nicholson, a British M.P. who has made three trips to the marshes, says the inhabitants can no longer sustain themselves. In the past eight months, more than 350 villages have been destroyed by shell and rocket fire. "The only way to live in the marshes today is to remain alone and move every day," said...