Word: darkeness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hence, in this volume, The Jew from Babylon tells of an itinerant sorcerer and healer who travels to a remote village and falls victim to the dark powers that have supported him in his trade. The House Friend features a young man in a Warsaw cafe listening to an older man recount his amorous adventures with married women. The Smuggler describes a visitor with some books to be autographed who pays a call on a writer in his New York City apartment and reveals, with hardly any prodding at all, some secrets...
...play centered on conversations between the recently deceased and their living friends. The voices of Merrill, Doyle, and Hooten combined with dramatic lighting effects, a backdrop of dark colored trees on a silk screen, and the voice of an unseen spirit from backstage...
...occurred to me, driving toward what was now my third interview with Nixon, at his home in Saddle River, N.J. (I had been there once before at a dinner last spring), that in fact I had always thought of Nixon as a comic character, a dark and serious American comic character, like someone out of Twain. Comic in the Checkers speech. Comic in the "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" farewell following his defeat in the California gubernatorial election in 1962. In the clownish 5 o'clock shadow of the first Nixon-Kennedy television debate...
...easy to conclude that he actually won the TV debate with Jack Kennedy; and he was a crook. So there. With Nixon, every circumstance eventually turns out to be funnier than he is. The nation he has trod these 75 years, the framework for his antics, is itself a dark and serious comedy, simultaneously rejecting and accepting everything in its midst; a riot, a scream. Sometimes (rarely) Nixon laughs aloud. The gunshot laugh, the "Ha!" It is what Beckett designated as the risus purus: the laugh laughing at itself in the abysmal farce, in which every part is deadly ridiculous...
...dark and serious comedy. The graceless, awkward, stiff, stumbling character trips about in a world occupied by natural athletes and virtuoso statesmen, though once he commanded that world. Preposterous contrasts are always good for a laugh. Alone onstage in Saddle River, the comedian raises himself to the company of heroes, soliloquizing that "it is necessary to struggle, to be embattled, to be knocked down and to have to get up." Look at history's great leaders, he says. They have all trod the wilderness at times. Churchill, De Gaulle, Adenauer. If the audience thinks such comparisons absurd, clearly the comedian...