Word: counterpoint
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...does not write rounded, formal speeches. The movie men in Speed-the-Plow, much like the thugs in American Buffalo (1975), the actors in A Life in the Theater (1977) and the singles-bar habitues of Sexual Perversity in Chicago, erupt naturalistically in fragments, in repetitions, in overlapping counterpoint of threats and expostulations and profuse four-letter words. Their conversation sounds authentic, yet is so idiosyncratic to its author that a couple of minutes suffice to identify it as his. This quicksilver gift of language, joined with an almost infinite slyness about the tricky uses to which words...
HONDURAS provides a fine counterpoint to this picture of chaos and decay. Honduras has long been our faithful pawn in Central America and thrives on our support. But last month, 2000 rioters took over the streets of the capital, Tegucigalpa, and burnt two U.S. embassy buildings to protest the United States' illegal extradition of noted drug trafficker, Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros. The riots were not in support of Matta, but in protest of the extradition of this Honduran citizen for crimes committed abroad, a direct violation of the Honduran Constitution...
...passions and peculiarities. First, he meets Arthur. Then Arthur introduces him to Phlox and Cleveland. Soon, he comes in contact with a world he had barely scraped the surface of in his early years: his father's world. Pittsburgh--smoke-filled and grim--serves as an an appropriate counterpoint to Bechstein's colorful journey...
...unexpected contexts; as Sarah seeks her karma in the Sunbelt, she has reason to resent "my old-fashioned Puritan conscience." But Updike's use of such references should not be taken too somberly; the stern, rock-ribbed moral universe of The Scarlet Letter serves here as a subtle counterpoint to a comic vision of anything-goes ethics in mid-1980s America...
...best performance of the evening is turned in by Jon Tolins as Angelo D'Ethe. As an incorporeal spirit, Tolins slides through the action all evening, providing more than a few scene-stealing bits and a constant, classy counterpoint to the bawdier action at center stage...