Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...brigades painted murals on walls, on public buildings, outside municipal swimming pools, in a happy and sometimes even erotic style that owed something not just to Leger and Picasso and the professional artist who occasionally joined in because he supported Popular Unity, but also to the pop art and comic books of the United States...
...today they seem impossibly culture-bound. It is, however, a tribute to his blithe showmanship that he put them over (along with such later high-minded successes as The Best Years of Our Lives and Porgy and Bess) at the same time that he was fabricating his own broad comic reputation. Sam Gold wyn was his own greatest production, and one can only be saddened that, at 91, death last week finally included...
...eating plants. Unfortunately, though this transformation scene is funny, and Mostel is at his absurd best, the scene is just too long and gimmicky. O'Horgan's determination to make the play a conventional comedy ruins the scene. It's always fun to exploit Mostel's talent. But long comic scenes which rely on conventional slapstick devices and stock audience responses have no place in Theater of the Absurd. Slapstick comedy is part of the audience's comfortable and familiar world which Theater of the Absurd sets out to shatter...
...Horgan, who has directed Absurd plays before, says that "The 'absurd' style has always rested uneasily with the naturalism of film." His production has not made a very successful accomodation of the two. The banal absurdity of his comedy version of Rhinoceros is amusing, but forceless. Relying on traditional comic routines and gimmickry, O'Horgan's film hardly approaches the stark abstraction of reality and denial of convention demanded by real Theater of the Absurd. He has made an absurd film of a good play, not a good film of an Absurd play. The American Film Theatre should have stayed...
...KEYS, by Noel Coward, is at the Shubert Theater in Boston, which seems like a long way to have to go for comic relief...