Word: contrasts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This year the cooling-down policy will be relatively uniform, in contrast to an attempt last year to save over $100,000 by turning down the heat almost completely in parts of some buildings...
...self-contained performances; unfortunately, the two characterizations are completely out of synch with each other. Epstein's Parson Morell partakes of the tragic stature of Pastor Manders in Ibsen's Ghosts, a part Epstein played last year. It is a moving, sympathetic portrayal, but its naturalism stands in uneasy contrast to Emerson's frenetic, histrionic, almost self-parodying Marchbanks. As the timid poet, Emerson shrinks, flinches and mugs his way to a good quantity of laughs. But the scene between the two antagonists, especially their initial confrontation, are jarring--not because of the clash of personalities, but because...
Jimmy Carter is not, as he admits, perfect. He can be a cold, inscrutable person. Superficially this seems a marked contrast to "nice guy" Jerry Ford. But the president's supposed personal decency like Carter's personal reserve, does not intrude on his political decisions. For evidence one need only turnt to the callous bombing of mainland Cambodia after the belligerent Mayaguez rescue operation; to Ford's effort to impeach ex-Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas for writing an article in a pornographic magazine; and to his Whip Inflation Now program, which helped plunge the country into a severe...
...contrast, the minor roles are handled with a much greater sense of what Shaw is about. Cynthia Cardon is just right as Prossy, Morell's secretary and admirer, snapping out her consonants, as Shaw once suggested she should, with a "ten pound gun hammer spring." Thomas Champion, as Burgess, Candida's father, has a laudable Cockney accent, and Mariani himself oozes idolatrous servility as the cleric Lexy. One of the most successful scenes in the production is the comic encounter between Prossy, Burgess and Marchbanks; in this run-in with characters who have the outlines of caricature, Marchbanks' own exaggerated...
...Mariani's inability to establish a suitable context for the action as a whole which is precisely this production's main failing. The set is too dowdy to help much; and the contrast in acting styles is matched by sometimes inappropriate shifts in mood. The extremely dark lighting in the last scene is overly somber for the revelatory nature of the action, while many of Marchbanks' scenes descend too far into farce. The proper Shavian mix of irony and humor, tragedy and comedy remains elusive...