Word: clowning
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There is a group of relatively new playwrights who might, if they chose, call themselves Pagliacci Incorporated. They are terribly blue about U.S. values and the state of the universe, but they clown around and tell lots of jokes, some of them quite funny, to soothe their philosophically broken hearts. They are seventh-rate Schopenhauers posing as third-rate Neil Simons...
...Renoir uses each new shot as an opportunity to restage his actors, according to the new relationships that have evolved among them. All that carries the drama smoothly from shot to shot is the force of their playing. Each character takes a different acting style (melodramatic heroine, slapstick clown) to an extreme; and the series of comic reversals which their conflicts of style engender becomes a social process so vivid that it overrides the startling disjunction between one composition and the next...
...Italo Calvino introduced to American readers in 1968 wore the mask of a metaphysical clown. Cosmicomics was rare science fiction-half Borges, half Groucho Marx-impishly mythologizing how the universe began. Inventing a cartoon-like character named Qfwfq and a supporting cast headed by a galaxy-Eve. Mrs. Vhd Vhd Calvino winged it with superb airiness -a Peter Pan for the space...
Rolling Back. U.S. spending on the war is being cut from $29 billion a year at the height of the buildup to a projected $16 billion this year; the number of American troops in Viet Nam is already clown to 339,200. Similar rollbacks are under way in Thailand, South Korea and the Philippines. Says a top financial official in the Thai government: "The U.S. withdrawal is going to affect us terribly. At first we thought it would be done more gradually, but now it seems to be speeding...
...melancholy, Neil Simon would be an oasis of laughter. His eye for the wryly amusing incongruities of life, his zingy one-line gag-ripostes, his ardently skilled desire to be entertaining-all these have made him the leading U.S. comic playwright for more than a decade. But like the clown with the yen to play Hamlet, Simon has had the urge, and been critically urged, to try his hand at more serious drama. The result is The Gingerbread Lady, a schizoid play in which the dramatist is so busy applying plasters of wit to woefully bruised psyches that the evening...