Word: clownishness
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ALTHOUGH ORIGINALLY CAST with the late Peter Sellers in the lead, Unfaithfully Yours works largely because of Moore's tremendous comic talent. Without resorting to the clownish absurdity of a Steve Martin or the profanity punctuated anger of a Richard Pryor. Moore delivers a comic performance rich in warmth and charisma. Even at slapstick, Moore delivers, pathetically catching his foot in a wall that he kicks in. In some jokes, you just have to be there, in Unfaithfully Yours, just Dudley Moore has to be there...
Patience's two leading men render fittingly stereotypic presentations of their characters. Thrope's Bunthorne is hopelessly clownish; he mugs ridiculous poses and his gray velvet costumes and black wig capture his superficiality as he practices all over the stage during his solo "Am'I Alone and unobserved? And Sullivan's Grosvenor mocks all handsome heroes with his marcissism powered by a stage presence that would sweep even the audience off its feet. Sullivan and Thrope prove excellent foils in brisk repartee during their duet. "When I Go Out of Doors," as Bunthorne tries to convince Grosvenor to become more...
...wistful, elegiac comedy that preserves a tight-lipped emotional reserve: confrontations that could be tragic are played for rueful laughter. Unlike most of Gurney's other plays, however, The Middle Ages has a well-knit, symmetrical plot. It offers two love stories, a star-crossed one between a clownish boy and the girl who occasionally impels him to grow up, and another, almost accidental, between the boy's father ("My mother got so bored she died") and the girl's divorced, social-climbing mother. The play is also a moving struggle for control and forgiveness between...
Given this entire strategy, the authors provoke sharp skepticism by repeatedly citing in the book's narrative section examples of Jewish rebel-speak from the mouths of a handful of the more clownish, and often more violent SDSers. Jerry Rubin: "I know [being Jewish] made me feel like a minority or outsider in America (sic.) from my birth and helped me become a revolutionary." And Abbie Hoffman (presumably on radical Jewish impotence): "Fidel [Castro] sits on the side of a tank rumbling into Havana on New Year's day... The tank stops in the city square. Fidel lets...
...great deal of extremely creative effort trying to give these characters individual identities. Some of this devices are brilliant--a series of "candid" snapshots of the four ladies, for example, accompany the lords standard ravings before the female delegation first appears. Likewise, a long home-movie of one clownish master-and-page pair (Brian McCue and Jessica Marshall) offers a solid basis for the two's relationship before their first exchange, and the relationship provides one of the few emotional landmarks in a wilderness of obscure Renaissance jokes. In other cases Lachow resorts to more familiar conceits of costume...