Word: comicly
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Barker played Amanda's "persona" a bit parodically, making her endlessly repeated reminiscences and her efforts to maintain the "Southern feminine" charm of her youth seems almost gratingly ridiculous--but that is, after all, the point; Amanda's ridiculousness makes her as much a pathetic figure as a comic one. She is moreover, in her own narrow-minded way, a fighter who puts a brave if silly face on things and who stubbornly refuses to admit defeat--which makes the cruelty of her final breakdown, powerfully portrayed by Barker, all the more painful...
...Much Fun is too kindhearted to fully recreate the sparkling wit and bitter undertones which make Parker's stories so memorable. Instead of allowing the lines in each scene to build up toward a devastatingly ironic conclusion, the show went for more regular laughs. In most scenes, this broader comic approach didn't seem to ring true with the sharp and often sarcastic dialogue...
Texas authorities were ecstatic at the bloodless finale. Of the seven people who held out through the week, five were in custody while two who had fled into the countryside seemed likely to be run to ground by bloodhounds and Rangers on horseback. Midway through the almost comic siege, reporters joked that Governor George W. Bush might have to turn into Governor Fujimori--a reference to the Peruvian President who had to use force to end the four-month siege of the Japanese embassy in Lima. Officials took every precaution in the standoff, not least because Texas is the place...
Burt-Kinderman performs the balancing act well. She moves with a casual grace that really transforms the Loeb from a theatre space into a real woman's apartment. She also has the rare comic gift of winning laughs without seeming to have any punch lines. Her jokes fall humbly out of her mouth as if she had just made them...
...leaving is that Axel, former OSS operative and friend of Presidents, has 'too many secrets, not enough mystery.' Ironically, what sets Echo House apart from the hyperrealities of the usual Washington novel is precisely its air of ineffability," notes Sheppard. "A novel with this much grievous personal history needs comic relief. Just obliges with Mrs. Pfister, fortune-teller to the Washington elite, whose sessions are bugged by government agents, and the 'Venerables,' a pair of aged columnists who 'had been out of step with every administration since Eisenhower's.' These geezers and other faded Washingtonians in 'Echo House' are more...