Word: clock
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Thatcher, who feared that London was losing ground to low-cost, high-volume centers like Wall Street. In 1983 her aides negotiated the ground rules for deregulation in the hope of turning the Exchange into a magnet for international investment. That goal fits handily with the increasingly round-the-clock nature of stock trading, in which international securities firms hand portfolios back and forth unceasingly between New York City, London and Tokyo...
...Tennessee Williams and the early Edward Albee -- only Arthur Miller has consistently reached out beyond domestic grief to comment on public life. For that aspiration, Miller has often been rebuked and advised to return to family melodrama. Probably no rejection hurt more than the fate of his The American Clock, a poignant panorama of what the 1930s did to the country's psyche; it opened on Broadway in November 1980 and lasted barely two weeks. Miller has not brought a new play there since...
...Miller rewrote the show, and last week Britain's National Theater gave it a handsomely designed, intelligently acted and altogether persuasive production -- not a revival, because in content, style and spirit this Clock amounts to new work. It is a robust, expressionistic celebration of a time that tore America apart yet paradoxically brought it together, an all but unique moment when millions of individual experiences coalesced into a collective national experience...
...particular family, resembling his own, whose growing deprivation and humiliation reflected the Depression in microcosm. These semiautobiographical characters proved unable by themselves to bear the weight of enormous events; meanwhile, the play's sweep had been diminished, and the tinkering, especially the search for jokes, had drained Clock of guts and vitality...
...purpose and even catastrophe to shake people out of self-absorption. As Lee Baum, the author's surrogate, Neil Daglish is touching, introspective and believably American. But the play's most convincing voice is Miller's, admonishing us: "There has never been a society that hasn't had a clock running on it." His American Clock records harrowing midnights and piteously false dawns...