Word: comical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...metaphor is a compelling one, even if Albee treats it too literally and tediously. When the play turns from sociological truisms to comic treatment of the manners of society, Albee is back in his own milieu. Richard Kerry's bland, but tasteful, set locates the action inescapably in a living room in modern suburbia -- right down to the inevitable green velveteen furniture. Richard (Robert Fox-worth) and Jenny (Jane Cronin) act like they just stepped out of a Raleigh commercial. In actuality, they are the kind of people who smoke bad cigarettes only because they are so deeply in hock...
...performers aren't particularly subtle either. They are often ingratiating, but their comic playing is heavy enough to suggest that they feel obligated to accentuate the obvious. On another level, they have the problem of tending to meld into one personality; if each of the five had something different to offer, there would be a corresponding increase of comic and dramatic possibilities...
...TIME BUCK WHITE. Dick Williams is more a bore than a bombshell as he delivers a sermon at a Black Power meeting. But the three years that the cast has worked together pays off in some fine comic ensemble playing...
...FROM HUMOR. Man's sense of the comic, says Berger, is fundamentally a sense of discrepancy, and the most basic is the discrepancy between man and the universe. Man's laughter, Berger believes, "reflects the imprisonment of the human spirit in the world"-and his audacious conviction, when that world seems awry, that the imprisonment is not final. "Religion," concludes Berger, "vindicates laughter...
Altogether there are about twenty bits, so a good deal of ground is covered in the much too short session. Some of the sketches are not as funny as others, but the great majority of them have a generous share of gags. Many fresh comic observations are brought to such topics as topless restaurants, Anglo-French rivalry, State Department press conferences, senility and even C. P. Snow ("known to writers as a scientist and known to scientists as a writer"). One of the longest and funniest monologues is that of a BBC-television sports broadcaster, who corrects an error...