Word: darknesses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Mark Medoff's drama takes place in a small western town in the late '60s and explores the illusions and alienation of American life. Medoff's vision is a dark one, and his play operates on a cynical, pessimistic energy. His characters are all trapped and they can't figure out how to escape. Medoff's message is that they never will. Attendant on this basic theme are chilling caricatures of conventional morality, marriage and love, as well as a wholesale shredding of the notion that human dignity has any meaning. The play depends heavily on characterization, and one senses...
...very different country. True, Americans have always been suckers for British humor, but there's a common cultural bond there; that bond is much weaker with regard to Italy. It is a strange and deeply troubled nation, small wonder then that its filmmakers should present such a dark vision. But while that vision might, possibly--just maybe--have some social significance, the flaws that pervade Viva Italia! make it hardly worthwhile, save for the hardiest Italophile. No one needs to offended, bored, and bewildered; at least no one should have to pay for that privilege, even if Vincent Canby tells...
...newspapers reported with some acidity, was "short, simple and cheap." It cost $2.15. The couple pulled up to a Moscow "wedding palace" in a battered, lemon-yellow Chevy Nova lent by a Greek diplomat. As a piano and string quartet played Mendelssohn's Wedding March, they entered a dark-paneled chamber. The bride and groom promised Klara Remeshkova, the equivalent of a justice of the peace, that they would preserve their love for all their lives, be faithful and loyal and stand together in love and sorrow...
...Stoltzman: "I don't like how the clarinet sounds most of the time. In the official style, you don't have enough freedom to wander." His own clarinet, by turns, mimics the fluttery delicacy of a flute, the finespun song of a violin, a bassoon's dark, melancholy air. His playing refuses to sound well-schooled. Even Mozart runs take off so spontaneously that Stoltzman might almost be improvising-as he often does. He recently took part in a jazz workshop at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and let fly with some big-band solos. Says...
...sharpest possible image expressed in the fewest possible words, his later poems grew increasingly allusive, personal and cryptic. Images were still present but encoded. Seeing what Pound saw before it filtered through his mind helps break that code. Sometimes the pictures simply amplify the words. Two pages of dark, roiling skyscape follow lines on Pisan's "undoubtedly various" clouds. More often than not though, a photographic sight helps explain a sound. A line like "Can Grande's grin like Tommy Cochran's" is meaningless without the knowledge that Tommy Cochran was "a kid" Pound knew...