Word: comic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...several years that they have shared rooms, the graduate student protagonists of Green Julia have put together a lively set of two-man routines. There's a lot of humor in the comic bits, not just in the word-play, but also in the hammy mugging of Stephen Kolzak and Paul Jackel as Jake and Bob. And when the covering starts to wear thin, there's also considerable potential for pathos. Ableman doesn't have enough control over his material to bring it off, though, and some clumsy inconsistencies and bad writing keep the play at the level of melodrama...
...play gets off to a slow start despite a madrigal-like solemn number about wives swearing to deny their husbands "entrance." At first, it's even difficult to hear some of the lines. But once the basic comic situation of the play is revealed--the male characters walking around with painfully exaggerated erections--things hit their stride. The translation seems to be William Arrowsmith's and usually it works out very well, and every once in a while the actors make it too clear it is a verse translation. And jokes the cast occasionally added--like one Athenian's wife...
...Misch was fortunate enough this night to have a shill blurt out a well-timed "If you're funny enough--any egg will crack up," to obscure the dreaded silence. But he'd do best to refrain from the clinkers and stick with his own fresh material. In a comic field sorely needing new humor. Misch seems to have his own little monopoly of laughs...
Later we asked if any of the students had put up posters criticizing the school, and the third girl nodded vehemently. People elaborated a little--there'd been recent posters criticizing teachers for ranking their students and for tearing up a student's comic book--and then we went outside to play fris bee: teaching fris bee was our main effort at building Chinese-American friendship. When we went back for more discussion, Shep Hoffman asked what people's ambitions were, and the three girls answered--if I hadn't liked them so much, I guess I'd have hated...
...afternoon to the Harvard Club's World Affairs Council. Heitman's main task as ambassador has been to defend the military junta that overthrew Salvador Allende's democratically chosen Popular Unity government last year. Heitman has thrown himself into his task with an enthusiasm so exaggerated it's almost comic, an enthusiasm he demonstrated in a letter to The New York Times last week. In the letter, the former admiral announced that a charge by a member of an international jurists' commission that the junta was sending Popular Unity's supporters' children to work camps was an injustice "unequalled...