Word: curtained
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
BOREDOM, OF COURSE, is the great difficulty, and the play's object must be to infuse some kind of interest and meaning into life, to fill the unforgiving span between the raising and the lowering of the curtain. That effort requires constant shifts in tone and attitude, from politeness to frenzy, from despair to humor. The characters, drawn together from a series of stock circus and stage types, continually try on roles, haggle over phrases and actions, force each other to react. To pass the time, they stage themselves, singing, arguing, lyricizing-and, in what emerges as the heart...
...long and the short of Eastern Europe's controlled economies is that some goods are always in surplus while others are maddeningly scarce. Thus the East Germans are plenteously swaddled in curtain material but sadly lacking in fresh fruit. The Czechs boast a superfluity of fruit but their coffee and vodka are prohibitively expensive. The Soviets are awash in coffee and vodka but desperately desire well-fashioned clothes and shoes. Nearly everyone in Eastern Europe hungers for Hungarian salamis, and Hungary is piled high with them; yet many a Magyar bosom droops despairingly for want of an uplifting...
...corsets and panty hose for Hungary; shoes, textiles and auto parts for Bulgaria. The enterprising Czech visitor either sells the articles for local currency or barters them for liquor in Rumania, coffee, vodka, car parts and a portable color-TV set in the Soviet Union, salami in Hungary, and curtain material in East Germany-all of which he either keeps or resells back home in Prague for three to five times his original investment...
While the rest of the cast is exemplary, it has only a shadowy existence on the periphery of the play. On from the first curtain to the last, Bates makes the evening blazingly his as a man slouching toward bedlam-hair bedraggled, trousers rumpled, eyes aglaze, and with an adder's tongue in his cheek. It is an indelible image that will find its way into dramatic legend.-T.E. Kalem
Another dream, another dinner. Invited to the home of a general of the French army, the friends find themselves in a strange room that seems to have been hastily arranged. Suddenly, sharp shafts of light appear from the ceiling. The guests turn in their seats, a curtain rises, and a theater audience stares at them with mild anticipation. Subjected to the same kind of vaguely contemptuous scrutiny they usually employ themselves, the guests, as one, make for the wings...