Word: dennison
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...Monday morning, August 19, 1946, at about 11, a high school girl named Dorothy Dennison left her home to buy some meat for dinner. A few hours later, when she still had not returned, Dorothy's mother telephoned the butcher. He told her he had sold Dorothy a pound of hamburger shortly before noon, but that he had not seen in which direction she was headed...
...first show, The Service for Joseph Axminister, written by George Dennison, is a bland serving of existentialism dished out the self-conscious way the man who created the TV Batman would have done it. Alas, despite its mellow content, it will make...
Staging a play within a play is a good way to get at the serious question of reality and illusion--provided the playwright is skillful. Dennison isn't. Instead of treating the device seriously or comically--as in Batman when a BLAM sign is flashed--he tries to do both at once and winds up with something that is laughable. There is, for example, an actor who "portrays" a train and at least four times walks across the stage carrying a framework that is suggestive of a train. Not to subtle...
...Dennison might have been able to salvage the play with incisive dialogue or characterization. Instead he lets the hobos--philosophers, the mistress of ceremonies calls them--mumble some chit-chat about death and human woe. Sometimes they paraphrase the Bible ("Man is dust--that's the main thing"), and sometimes, like one of Beckett's characters, they talk of how it would be better not to have been born...
...state duly returned his sole possession: the two pennies taken from him when he entered prison. Now a grey-haired, unemployed man of 57, Dennison understandably sued New York for $500,000 in damages. Last week the Court of Claims awarded him $115,000-freely admitting, in Judge' Heller's words, that "no sum of money would be adequate to compensate the claimant for the injuries he suffered and the scars which he obviously bears...