Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...BIRTHDAY PARTY, by Harold Pinter, is a 1958 play written prior to The Caretaker and The Homecoming. Party lacks the dramatic sophistication of tone, tempo and themes of the two later plays; yet the telltale stigmata are all here-dread, panic, menace, mocking comic absurdity, the evasive unwillingness of people to level with each other. Except for Edward Flanders, the American cast is often blunt and plodding when it should be sardonic, cutting and athletic, but Pinter nevertheless provides prickly excitement and a tantalizing quota of questions without answers...
SCUBA DUBA is a flagellatingly funny first play by Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman about an American screwball whose wife runs off with a Negro during a Riviera holiday. Jerry Orbach is perfectly cast as the husband, indiscriminately spraying comic vitriol at countless pet hates. Brenda Smiley is wriggly as a lass with a mini-mind and a Proustian remembrance of flings past...
...confusion." The principal exhibit, "Pictures to be Read / Poetry to be Seen," focused on the works of twelve artists who employ both pictorial images and written words and ranged from the exquisite to the spectacularly shoddy. Among the most successful were the intricate lens constructions of Mary Bauermeister, the comic-book panels by Chicago's James Nutt, and the reconstruction of a 1964 Happening staged by Allan Kaprow, in which gallerygoers were invited to "make poetry, make news" by stapling random words together on the wall...
SCUBA DUBA is a flagellatingly funny first play by Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman about an American screwball whose wife runs off with a Negro during a Riviera holiday. Jerry Orbach is jokingly brilliant as he indiscriminately sprays comic vitriol at countless pet hates. Brenda Smiley is a wriggly delight as a lass with a mini-mind and a Proustian remembrance of flings past...
...Stoppard owes fully as much to Samuel Beckett as he does to Shakespeare. R. and G. are transparent replicas of the two tramps who wait for Godot. But where Beckett's dialogue almost expires in pauses of resignation, Stoppard's lines pant with inner panic. Delivered with comic ardor at machine-gun speed, R. and G.'s interchanges combine mental verve with spiritual desolation. It is as if the quiz kids of Wittenberg U. found themselves desperate at flunking in life. R.: What's the matter with you today? G.: When? R.: What...