Word: cistern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Early in the first act, Killinger establishes the dumpy flat as his domain and Jory augments Osborne's complex stage directions with a few tricks of his own to keep it that way. For instance, the script calls for Porter to kick a cistern, then sit and play it like a Bongo in the second act. Jory has junked that and instead has Jimmy playing a complex jazz solo with plates and glasses on the bleak little tea table, as Alison announces that she's going out with her friend Helena. "That's not a direction," Porter replies in perfect...
...honeyed voice, Bert, a throat that lets slip pure and full sounds. A richly voweled music breaks from her. But her face is too fleshy, her stature too mean to be a princess. She stamps and pouts too much. Here is this woman, who should be a cistern of demonic forces, and she lets you think she quarrels over prices at the butcher...
Disasters follow briskly. Ants. Unions. Overflowing toilets. Insufficient rain. A crooked contractor. A love affair with an alcoholic actress. Insufficient working capital. Island politics. And then an earthquake cracks the cistern that holds the resort's entire water supply, the naive native bankers turn out to be as rapacious as barracudas, and a key employee goes homicidally...
Myths about the camel and its thirst-resistance are older than the Sphinx-and almost as durable. Well into the modern age of science, men accepted the notion that the evil-tempered animal could store a two-week supply of water in its humpor in a great, cistern-like stomach. The hump theory was the first to be discarded as so much humph. What the camel carries on its back is a reserve of fatty tissue to be consumed when the rest of the camel runs out of fuel. The story about the parched Bedouin who slaughtered his favorite camel...
...lights came up on the curtainless stage of East Berlin's Komische Oper last week, and there, pregnant with portents of disaster, hung a textured moon that looked like a fly's swollen eye. A shock. When John the Baptist was pulled barefoot from his cistern prison, his long matted hair hung down to his animal skin sarong. Another shock. Then came Salome with her veils and her dances, and in a spirit perfectly suggested by the jewel stuck in her navel, she treated an earnest audience to a performance of Strauss's shocker that came straight...