Word: dictional
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...author's evident flexibility of diction is another such pleasure. Atwood can range with ease from the academically highbrow to the high-school casual. Even this talent comes under self-satire from time to time, as in "Writing the Male Character...
...lameness of the dialogue--much of it in stylized rhyme--suggests another problem stemming from the script's unpopularity--bad translation. Though program notes refer the Jens Arup translation to a 1962 edition of Ibsen, the play's diction betrays all the self-conscious "translationese" of the turn of the century--even to the using the word "poesy" for "poetry" here and there. Faced with the need to make lines like "Can you not re-weld the link you tore asunder?" and "Am I to hallmark your complacency?" sound natural, director Holly Swartz takes the logical strategy of stylizing...
...traditional arguments about Salesman is whether its diction is failed lyricism or failed realism. But it is neither: its first director, Elia Kazan, says it is written "just off the real." Miller's people are first-and second-generation Americans who have yet to achieve a perfect-pitch imitation of standard American brag, bluff and bluster; their language is thus a precise and moving metaphorical expression of the uneasiness with which they live in the American dream they have not quite assimilated. By touching this language with the accents of Brooklyn's old ethnic neighborhoods, this company simultaneously...
...grew older, and his range, well represented in this show, now seems a wholly epic form of human character. It moves from the tenderness of his child portraits and the demure, precise eroticism of early works like Salome through the powerful confidence of his portraits and the majestic diction of the Escorial's recently cleaned Christ on the Cross, and so on to the late works...
...play narrator John Gower, appeals well at first. Yet each time he comes on stage he affects the same position, demeanor, voice and gestures until his idiosyncrasies become grating and tiresome. Pericles, played by Ben Halley Jr. mimics a stiff operatic James Earl Jones, a stunning figure with fine diction, but his manner is too rigidly classical and neither dramatic nor human. Sandra Shipley as Thaisa plays her role with quiet understanding and control. With only a few lines, she surmounts Pericles as the family's core. Jeannie Affelder '83 as Marina speaks and moves with soulless uniformity, relieved only...