Word: contrivedness
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Viet Nam toppled a lot of dominoes in American life. It forced Lyndon Johnson out of the White House, paving the way for Richard Nixon. In a besieged mentality brought on by antiwar protests, some of Nixon's men contrived the various schemes that added up to Watergate, thereby enabling...
Speculation about who would eventually replace Chernenko began almost from the moment he was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party in February 1984. He delivered a wheezing, gasping eulogy at the Red Square funeral of Yuri Andropov and could not hold his hand up in a salute. During the...
This work seems to suffer acutely from a problem of genre: is it a play? is it an opera? Billed as a "musical tale," it seems neither fish no, fowl nor the best of both worlds. The music, written and performed by Philip Lasser, is elusive and singularly inappropriate in...
Lynch's off-the-wall proposition and Bob Clark's direction are not entirely dissimilar. Both suffer from a glaring lack of sensitivity: Lynch to his eramorata and Clark to his audience. Clark ruins a potentially funny--if somewhat contrived--storyline by attempting to stretch one joke over 45 minutes...
Whitemore's use of soliloquies in a realistic framework brings his competence as a playwright into serious question. The tone and execution of the play strive for realism, but Whitemore undercuts it with the formal monologue--one of the most contrived devices in the dramatist's handbook. Simple reminiscences intended...