Word: dourness
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Andorra, which closed at week's end, was about antiSemitism, chauvinism, responsibility, guilt, and identity. The Firebugs, still flickering, is about action, appeasement, war, and middle-class morality. Like Duerrenmatt, Frisch has a dour and sardonic vision of existence; unlike Duerrenmatt, he is maddeningly repetitive. What he spent more than four hours saying in his ear-bending, double-entry U.S. debut was once compressed by Alexander Hamilton into a single pungent sentence: "The people is a great beast...
Overnight Case. Brussels, the scene of Britain's dashed hopes last week, is a dour, neon-lit old maid of a city. On Monday, the cobbled streets were slimy with black slush and blanketed with chilling fog as Britain's chief negotiator. Edward Heath, arrived with his aides. Minister for Commonwealth Affairs Duncan Sandys and Agriculture Minister Christopher Soames. The French, with a fine sense of economy, traveled light; only Luxembourg's four-man delegation was smaller. French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville brought only an overnight case, for he knew that he would...
There was no shortage of problems. In Moscow, dour Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko declared, "France must sign." fully aware that De Gaulle has no intention of joining a test ban. Another question was how to ring in Red China, which is expected to explode an A-bomb by year's end. Since Peking had not yet done so, Gromyko said, the problem was "artificial." Anxious to keep the talks going. U.S. officials grasped at straws -and hopeful phrases. "I don't think this closes the door," said one. "It's just atmospheric noise...
Last week Physicist Edward Teller, the dour genius who led the U.S. in its race to develop the H-bomb ahead of the Russians, reported on the progress of the Atomic Energy Commission's Project Plowshare, exploring peaceful applications of nuclear explosions. He told of a Plowshare test in Nevada last summer in which a thermonuclear device with a power of 100 kilotons (equivalent to 100,000 tons of TNT) was exploded underground, creating in a few seconds a crater 1,200 ft. wide and 320 ft. deep. Such explosions, he said, could be used to make harbors...
Died. John Shubert, 53, dour, second-generation head of a backstage family that owned and ran the nation's biggest chain of legitimate theaters (17 of the 33 on Broadway, others in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Cincinnati); of a heart attack; aboard a train bound for Florida. True to Shubert's instructions, his funeral took place on the stage of the Majestic Theater, with his widow seated by the casket, and some 1,200 mourners and business associates in the orchestra and balconies. No clergy officiated at the rites held, as the theater owner requested...