Word: despairful
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...counts, thinks again, and eventually comes up with 16--a figure which includes quite a few off-campus productions done in Boston theaters with his semi-professional repertory group, the Temperamental Ensemble. Rauch takes longer and gets to "somewhere in the early twenties" before throwing up his hands in despair at this spring's schedule. Instead of directing one or two discrete shows this term, he pulled together an ensemble of old and new actors called the Kronauer Group. The Kronauer Group, many of whom had worked together before did staged readings and adaptations, and concentrated on learning from...
...Austria toward the end of the 1930s, Jewishness is a defect; there can be no denying such a truth. But life itself is far from perfect, and there is no reason to despair because of that. Perhaps the fault is correctable, a matter of inflamed nerves, bad habits, insufficient exercise. A few months in clean mountain air should help. Early bedtime, rise at dawn. Plain food. Hard work. Early morning runs. Reform is possible. Anything is possible...
Written in 1904, Summerfolk was prescient about the 1905 revolution in Russia, which was a dress rehearsal for the cataclysm that brought the Bolsheviks to power twelve years later. Reflecting the boredom and despair of the Russian middle class, it is Gorky's most Chekhovian work. It follows, without an obvious plot, the lives and loves of the summer folk who spend their vacations, as always, in cottages in the woods. Sellars, 26, who came to national attention with a production of The Inspector General at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard while he was still an undergraduate there...
...stand on constantly shifting planes of reality. When the Stepdaughter (Lise Hilboldt) and the Father (Robert Stattel) see "real" actors imitating the gestures and words they had used in moments of true passion, they initially cannot recognize themselves. When they do, they greet the realization with both laughter and despair. Mirrors and lighting (designed by Michael Yeargan and Jennifer Tipton, respectively) make such scenes visually exciting and intellectually stimulating...
...only essential but is unique among his contemporaries. Bellow has been the most rigorous naysayer to nihilism of his era. He has never tried to hide the gloomy truths about modern life or gloss over all the sound reasons (starting or ending with Auschwitz) for a thinking person to despair. His most memorable characters (Herzog, Mr. Sammler, Henderson the Rain King) can list in sometimes comic detail all the symptoms of the decline of the West. Almost alone in serious contemporary fiction, though, Bellow's heroes think that a cure may be worth...