Word: deftly
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What is welcome about this deft writing-off of a twerp is that the voice is not Lottie's. It is the author's, and the effect is to give the reader distance from characters who, though they don't realize this, are acting out a comedy. But novelist Miller, instead of describing the mawkishness, chose to take trifling people seriously. The result is that although the author's previous novel Family Pictures became a prime-time TV mini-series, For Love is daytime soap opera...
...remember when I was in the womb; I was over on the right"). Michael Moore of Roger & Me reruns his rollicking contempt for General Motors (and for humanity) in Pets or Meat. The gem is A Sense of History, directed by Mike Leigh. Jim Broadbent, who wrote this deft monologue, plays a squire of Churchillian mien and Sweeney Todd meanness. Not since Browning's My Last Duchess has an aristocrat confessed his crimes with such self-lacerating...
...DIFFICULT TO call agitprop against South Africa hard-hitting; how many pro-apartheid plays get mounted in the U.S.? But THE SONG OF JACOB ZULU, which Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe brought to Broadway last week, redeems its overlong preachments with Eric Simonson's deft direction and K. Todd Freeman's luminous acting of the title role, especially a final monologue in which he unsentimentally uncorks the rage that drove a minister's son to terrorism. What makes the show unique is the unearthly beauty of a capella songs by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the group highlighted on Paul Simon's Graceland...
...Credit of the director, Vladimir Ragulin, the staging is deft, except for a few of the exit scenes, in which characters continue lengthy dialogue while trapped ambiguously between lines and exit cues. The gender reversal of many of Mamet's male characters--though potentially interesting in light of much current debate on gender--remains undeveloped. As women, these formerly male characters offer no relevant insight into the innumerable questions that this type of inversion could raise...
MICHAEL KELLY'S DEFT, IMPRESSIONISTIC reporting in MARTYRS' DAY (Random House; $23) of a journey around the Gulf War's edges is a useful reminder of what went on. Just before the shooting started, his travelogue of Baghdad ("unusually ugly lampposts") has the flip quality of a travel piece. In Amman, Jordan, violently pro-Saddam, the streets "hummed with a mean joy. At last somebody was killing Jews." In Tel Aviv, he discovers women who deck their gas-mask kits in velvet. After the 100-hour land war, incinerated Iraqi corpses burn off the vapors of his irony; in liberated...