Word: cante
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Throughout the play Friedman lances pet hates with an ardor so indiscriminate as to seem bracingly honest. The air is unfogged by any pious cant about brotherly love as he tongue-twits Jews, Negroes, Babbitts, Frenchmen, Chinese, Yugoslavs, white liberals, black militants, wives, husbands, thieves and psychiatrists. From this last and presumably lowest shelf of humanity, the playwright produces a fatuously brain-shrunk specimen who brings his patient-paramour to the chateau. She in turn treats Manhattan's theatergoers to the sight of their first topless actress, but it must ungallantly be recorded that the lady's mammaries...
...same, Author Mayer has come away with more faith in the law than many lawyers. Says he: "The rest of us put up with the arrogance of the lawyers-accept their, rigidities, their partial perceptions, their occasional corruption, their portentous self-praise, their cant, their infernal waste of time -not because we care about the niceties or even the creative accomplishments of the legal system, but because we sense, we hope,' that the law seeks justice...
...screen, the comedy of the absurd comes close to being a tragedy of the impossible. Author Murray Schisgal's original was a cockeyed but unerringly apt satire of people who make Freud their only poet, whose love talk is all about adjustment, alienation, angst and other pop-psychological cant. But this deft parody has given way to the adolescent vulgarisms of Scriptwriter Elliott Baker, who plots slapstick sequences in a department store and a Japanese restaurant that would be tasteless in a Jerry Lewis movie...
Unfortunately, he cops out on the answers, leaving us with one handful of medieval cant and another of contrived happy endings. Shakespeare ends the play, but he never really resolves it. To Shakespeare's sophistry, Timothy Mayer has added gimmickry and faddistry, carefully avoiding the problem of how to clarify and dramatize the play's hard theological core. Putting the play and the characters in modern dress has its dividends. Angelo gets a laugh when he says "Call him hither" into an intercom, and Lucio gets one when he lights his cigarette with a votive lamp. In short, Mayer...
Just as the Government should replace cant with candor, so the dissenters need a strong dose of realism and responsibility. Among the great legal lessons of the civil rights movement, for example, is the rule that a demonstration must be reasonably related to a specific target of protest. Demonstrators who glorify the Viet Cong, burn flags or draft cards, urge the world in general to "make love, not war," are indulging in dissent for dissent's sake. They are staging a mindless happening devoid of rational ideas...