Word: butley
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...OPENED IN London in 1987, it dealt memorably if imperfectly with the random, amoral way that glittering success and crippling insanity are doled out, sometimes to the same person. In compulsive revisions, the most recent of which, THE HOLY TERROR, opened last week off Broadway, the normally astute Gray (Butley, The Common Pursuit) has flung out the baby and preserved the bath water. Two ideas worked in the tale of a foppish, philandering publisher: narrating his decline in flashback, from the vantage of a man afflicted and now somewhat healed, which earned instant sympathy; and letting his worldly fall lead...
...Butley at the Lyric Stage...
Simon Gray, 50, is the laureate of the intellectual as moral vandal. His best plays, from Butley (1971) and Otherwise Engaged (1975) to the witty and poignant The Common Pursuit, which opened off- Broadway last week, depict men of privilege and potential who, out of indifference or gleeful masochism, systematically degrade everything around them, not least their own bright promise. They are apt to view their intelligence either as a burden, leading people to expect things of them, or as an outright curse, lifting their vision just enough to comprehend genius but nowhere near enough to emulate it. Well into...
Quartermaine's Terms calls for a more self-effacing style of acting, though the results are scarcely less virtuosic. Unlike Simon Gray's two major U.S. successes, Butley and Otherwise Engaged, this semicomic, semipoignant drama, set in a bleary backwater of academe, does not focus on a caustic wit who tosses poisoned darts at the world around him. Quartermaine's Terms is Gray's gentlest and most compassionate play. No stiff upper lips need apply. The drama's hero, or non-hero, might be called "Mr. Cellophane," after a song in the musical Chicago. People...
During his first week on the job. Butler recalls, so many people happened upon the office while searching for the place to pick up Yale game tickets that he began to search for the tickets himself, "I thought may be we were selling them," Butley Laughs...