Word: come
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...prepared to show the rest of rural America how it is done, the Foundation offers to pay the expenses of physicians, engineers and teachers to come to Michigan to study the remarkable spectacle of 220,000 people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps...
...Here Come the Clowns (by Philip Barry; produced by Eddie Dowling) is not, as the title suggests, a lighthearted comedy, but the bitter, twisted story of a modern Job. Sceneshifter Dan Clancy (Eddie Dowling) has been blinded in one eye, has lost his home, his job, his child, and been deserted by his wife. Literally searching for God to find an answer to his sufferings, he stumbles on a group of vaudevillians in a speakeasy. One of them has the sinister talent of worming the truth out of people, and drags from a dwarf and a ventriloquist their tragic, bleeding...
What is powerful in Here Come the Clowns is not its tricky story nor its Sunday-school philosophy but its ominous, troubled atmosphere. The hypnotic "illusionist," with his Mephistophelean sense of evil; the hysterical emotions of the dazed people he operates upon; the submerged, intolerable griefs that he forces them to stammer out-these have the kind of horror found in Thomas Mann's famed story Mario and the Magician. Melodramatic, a little shrill, a little unearthly, Here Come the Clowns is like a grotesque tune played on a broken fiddle...
...with such smart comedies as Holiday and Paris Bound. But he is most warmly admired by the elect for an ironic fantasy, White Wings. And he has most thoroughly puzzled and stimulated theatre-goers with his mystical play, Hotel Universe, in its intentions something of a precursor to Here Come the Clowns. Two contradictory kinds of talent are apt to keep Barry from ever becoming a cut-to-measure playwright : on the one hand, a keen eye for manners, a suave wit, a gift for fresh, pointed dialogue; on the other, a restless imagination, great moral heat, a feeling...
...Prize Play, You and I. Married and the father of two young sons, Barry for years lived abroad, now lives in Florida. His good friends include such well-known sophisticates as Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Donald Ogden Stewart. This fall Barry published his first novel, War in Heaven- Here Come the Clowns in fiction form...