Word: clan
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...Piano Lesson (1989). An heirloom from a slave ancestor threatens to sunder members of the Charles clan: one wants to keep it as a reminder of suffering, another would sell it to buy the farm where the family were once chattel. Playwright August Wilson was the most important American stage voice to emerge in the '80s, and this piano is the most potent symbol in American drama since Laura Wingfield's glass menagerie...
Gage relives his father's American Dream more passionately than his own. The author's exploits are subordinated to the old man's: his struggles to sustain his clan and make sure that his daughters find suitable (meaning Greek) husbands. Gatzoyiannis' death at age 90 provides a classic resolution. Surrounded by his children and grandchildren, he drifts off on old memories. It is a scene that evokes Chekhov and his observation that "any idiot can face a crisis. It is this day-to-day living that wears...
...legacies. The tradition of performing reaches back to her grandparents and includes her father, her mother Rachel Kempson, brother Corin, 50, and sister Lynn, 46 -- plus, now, Vanessa's film-star daughters Natasha Richardson, 26 (Patty Hearst), and Joely Richardson, 24 (Drowning by Numbers). In Vanessa's generation, the clan paid a steep emotional price. Says Lynn: "All families are peculiar in some way, but ours was extraordinary, a volatile, emotional and passionate mix, which probably helped us to be good actors. My parents never got us up in the morning or picked us up from school. We could live...
...were plutocrats and oppressors. The whole history of Chinese merchants in Southeast Asia is ambiguous. They provide prosperity but also isolate themselves and take profit from the local population." His mother grew up in a walled family compound until the Japanese commandeered it during World War II. Then the clan moved into a "haunted house" in Manila. Legend had it that someone from each family who lived there would die in the place. "No one did in our family, which was attributed by my relatives to their fundamentalist Christianity. My mother's grandmother was a sort of exorcist, casting...
...ears, an end zone where we can spike the ball and do a victory dance. What it provides, in dizzying abundance, is one damned thing after another. This vividly expressed thought comes to us courtesy of Parenthood's Jason Robards, who plays Frank, the grandpaterfamilias of a clan he has considerable reason to wish he had not extended quite so extensively back when he was young and frisky...