Word: demonism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...reach. In dramatizing her efforts to get the money back, the film shows that no one can want anything as much as a child does. No one can be so desperate, endearing, selfish. Razieh is a maven of curb-level politics, a born haggler. She'd be a demon at any yard sale...
...THEATER THESE DAYS, HIGHmindedness is not a very seaworthy trait. Most of the English plays that have sailed across the Atlantic and landed on Broadway of late have been high-tech musicals or dramas ballasted by big-name movie stars. David Hare's Racing Demon--which has no major stars, focuses on two priests in the Church of England and traffics in both theological debate and sociological observation--is therefore an unlikely arrival...
...Racing Demon, which premiered in London in 1990, is part of a Hare trilogy that includes Murmuring Judges, which scrutinizes England's legal system, and The Absence of War, examining its politics. If the entire venture has something of an old-fashioned feel--a kinship with those "condition of England" novels of Wells, Galsworthy, Forster--that's probably all right with Hare, 48. With these plays (and others, such as Plenty and Map of the World), he has embraced a theater of social and moral probing. By frequently setting one character to debating another (about the ordination of women, declining...
...congenital danger of such plays, of course, is a tendency to be peopled by talking heads rather than full-bodied characters, and Racing Demon sometimes does feel overly abstracted. But Brian Murray does a fine job of linking head to body: he plays, movingly, a homosexual priest who flees the country rather than face public exposure. In the moments when Murray trembles over a hastily packed suitcase, Hare shows he can do more than write an intelligent and noble play; he can shake the soul...
...Beast: A Reckoning with Depression (Putnam; 286 pages; $23.95), Tracy Thompson, a reporter for the Washington Post, provides a harrowing chronicle of her battle against the demon she calls "a psychic freight train of roaring despair." Thompson is uncommonly thoughtful on many levels--from her fearful childhood in a Southern fundamentalist family, to her confused entanglement with a harshly supportive man, to her hospitalization in a mental ward and her sunlit rescue by Prozac. Thompson's reporter's eye is unsparing, and she writes with tough grace. About one of her more hopeful moments: "Life did not get easier...