Word: complexities
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Einstein, Edward Hightower was well-cast as the slightly naive, thoughtful Einstein. As the more flamboyant Picasso, Shawn Elinoff, 1996 Artist-in-Residence for the Hyperion Shakespeare Company, shone: the Picasso he embodied was complex, filled with bitterness, insecurity and lust but most of all, a passion for his artistic vision...
...Complex societies do not easily find leaders to follow, even causes to unite behind. If Ronald Reagan was our last widely beloved President, you'd hardly know it from the depth of antipathy he provoked in 40% of the population. The good war--the universally endorsed war--is a half-century behind us. Entertainers? Not a chance. Our tastes are too motley, our options too many. And the entertainer's natural vanity is implicit in his choice of a career...
...thank heaven, a particularly magnificent one. Travolta and writer-director Steve Zaillian, compressing complex issues and characters with admirable craft, make it clear that greed and ego, more than compassion, drive Schlichtmann. Only when he reaches straits as dire as his clients' does he (non-melodramatically) achieve something like full humanity. Meantime, we've enjoyed a richly acted--see especially Robert Duvall's dreamy-fox opposition lawyer--subtly suspenseful, blessedly unmoralizing morality play...
...South's effort to heal the schisms of the Civil War (in an opening flashback, a Confederate soldier sings of home); portrays the tensions between Frank, a transplanted New Yorker, and his more assimilated Southern-Jewish wife Lucille; and sketches everything from the sensationalistic press coverage to the complex social pressures on the case, in which Frank's chief accuser (and, it now appears, the probable murderer) was a black...
DIED. WILLIAM GADDIS, 75, venerated modernist author; of prostate cancer; in East Hampton, N.Y. Gaddis, who published four complex novels in 40 years, never achieved a popular following, but he did win ecstatic acclaim from critics. His innovative use of language and masterly social satire inspired comparisons to Joyce, Pynchon and Melville. When scholars tried to deconstruct his work, he said, "What can I do if people insist I'm cleverer than I think...