Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...comic prologue (performed in English) consists of recitatives and spoken passages, as a regular opera company skirmishes with a troupe of comedians for possession of the stage. Their battle ends in a draw and each is forced to endure the other's presence on stage during the performance of the sorrows of Ariadne. Strauss uses the vigorous movement and comic music to undercut the idealized romantic opera on which the comedians trespass...
...After wowing the committee, Hero asks only a simple favor: "Give me my Ph.D." The Dean clears it through "Social Studies" and "Hero" becomes "Dr. Hero," moving through more comic sequences until in pure Horovitz fashion, Dr. Hero passes into tragic senility...
...spectacularly elsewhere in the world, as in the 1970 kidnapings by French-Canadian separatists of Quebec Minister of Labor Pierre Laporte and British Trade Commissioner James Cross. But in the U.S., political extremism has taken other forms, though the Berrigan brothers and their friends did kick around an almost comic-opera scenario to kidnap Henry Kissinger as part of their antiwar activities...
McCleery finds that the type of skirmish in the war between the sexes lends itself to comic portrayal. In his play the struggle between modern mates for an egalitarian relationship is one for position, not for survival. No life and death issues are thrashed out here. "I wanted to show what marriage can be like for a young couple when the rules have changed. The old formulas aren't there any more and these people have to get by without any until new ones take their place," McCleery explained. "They have to remember the old joke about how porcupines make...
Naturalism is the right style for McCleery: it lets him explore real people in recognizably human situations making it through their crises with little psychic hurt. An optimist himself, McCleery consciously intends to stress the comic and the positive in plays. The vividness intrinsic to naturalism allows him to make his points clearly, showing his audience the dynamic process through which his characters resolve their conflicts so favorably...