Word: comic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...short scenes, the more straightforward monologues, and the blocking--he fails to mold the play into a coherent whole. At times characters portray themselves, at other times they take on a variety of roles--these crucial transitions are too often undelineated. The court speeches (the easiest and most comic roles) are inexcusably weak. Claude Sloan, David Brain Wilkins, and Don Gillespie (as the Missionary, the Judge, and the Governor) merge into one spewing monotone; the Queen should be a mannered foil to Virtue, but L. Maxine Freeman lacks the necessary elegant pretension. Paul Brasuell shines as her valet, simpering...
...Abmaphid. The abundance of humor provides constant comic relief. It has an enormously supple range, by turns sophisticated, acid, intellectual, putdown, cynical, broad, black and even sick. The two leads are superb. Dewhurst does not need to bray "I am the Earth Mother." We know it on sight. We sense that a Samson might have won her respect but never an "Abmaphid ... A.B. ... M.A. ... Ph.D." As "the bog in the history department," Gazzara's professorial George is detached but not desiccated. His wry grin portends revenge. He is a much trodden worm with a cobra's fangs...
...that there is another person trapped in that joke-Sophie Portnoy, the archetypal castrating Jewish mother, standing over her little boy with a stainless steel bread knife when he refuses to eat. The joke is a funny one, no doubt-and by elevating a stand-up routine into a comic art form, Philip Roth gave popular American culture the definitive stereotype of the Jewish mother. As for the Jewish grandmother, she is merely Sophie Portnoy writ large...
...Good Man, Charlie Brown. A musical based on Charles Schulz's famous comic strip. At the Winthrop House Junior Common Room, April 8-10 and 15-17, at 8 p.m. Special late-evening performances April...
...atmospheric oil of a saturnine King Faisal, the Man of the Year (Jan. 6, 1975), by Bob Peak. Anwar Sadat's head is perched on sphinxlike paws in a pencil-and-ink sketch by Isadore Seltzer (May 17, 1971), while Peter Max produced a comic mixed-media collage for our "Is Prince Charles Necessary?" cover (June 27, 1969). The brooding poet Robert Lowell is given a crayoned zigzag crown of laurels by Sidney Nolan (June 2, 1967), while Boris Artzybasheff painted a blue-faced underwater Jacques Cousteau (March 28, 1960). Among the other artists in the show: Pietro Annigoni...