Word: clowning
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...puritanical and humorless Malvolio, the square peg in the play's round hole, wears a long black gown and sports a moustache and goatee, looking for all the world as though he had just been sitting for a sober portrait by Van Dyck or Rembrandt. Feste the Clown is dressed in pink and rose, and makes use of hand-pup-sets. The earnest Viola first appears is dark gold; but when she disguises herself as the page Cesario, both she and her twin brother Sebatian (each believing the other drowned) are clothed in white-ruffed cerulean, exuding the purity...
...moment later it knocks at the door and announces, with a hammer-and-sickly grin: "We're Norwheeguns." Actually the nervous Norsemen are petrified Soviet sailors whose sub has run aground on a sand bar. Their spokesman is Alan Arkin, a cabaret satirist (Second City) and Broadway clown (Luv), making a major movie debut that probably deserves an Oscar, a Lenin Peace Prize, and any other encouragements a wicked old world can offer...
...looking puffy, overblown and overweight, exhibited Chimes and Midnight, a lively film that he directed and wrote with the help of William Shakespeare, who supplied the chief character: Falstaff, played by Welles. Through the centuries, most actors have had to stuff padding under their tights to play the renowned clown. Welles, at 51, remains unique; he is probably the first actor in history who appears too fat for the role...
...Another Kind. Juxtapositions of paintings also suggest hitherto unexpected correspondences. In the decade 1925 through 1934 are works by such divergent artists as that arcane, Swiss-born Bauhaus prof, Paul Klee, the Chicago anatomist of decay, Ivan Albright, the tragic expressionist Arshile Gorky, and the U.S.'s clown-painting Walt Kuhn. In paintings executed within a three-year span, each depicts man masked in dreadful isolation...
...from the flat, pastry-oval visages of The Artist and His Mother, a memory portrait that bridges from surrealism to the beginnings of abstract expressionism. Klee mimes a four-footed animal in his calligraphic Mask of Fear. Kuhn creates another kind of mask-that of the silent, sad clown-and makes it a vision of man turned into useless performer, while Albright excoriates the self in his wrinkly "And God Created Man in His Own Image." Unrelated by style or influence, each artist nonetheless portrays man in the early Depression years as a desperate creature searching for identity, not sorrow...