Word: dourness
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...faded letters and papers into the kitchen stove, who should shuffle in and plop into his favorite armchair but old Da himself (Barnard Hughes)? Only to be followed by Young Charlie (Richard Seer), Charlie's teen-age self; Mother (Sylvia O'Brien); and Drumm (Lester Rawlins), a dour early employer given to pungent maxims: "Marriage is the maximum loneliness with the minimum of privacy." The play proceeds by anecdotes and episodes, some funny, some sad, all telling. Leonard makes the pas sage of time itself a major character in Da. What time does for Charlie is to make...
Indeed it is. The KGB center, as its command complex of buildings is called, is located only a few blocks from the Kremlin-at 2 Dzerzhinsky Square. The dour, ocher-colored buildings look down on the Bolshoi Theater and the entrance to Red Square. The agency has a huge network of informers within the U.S.S.R., and it can often veto applications for new jobs, visas and university admissions. It operates prison camps and mental hospitals and directs the Soviet campaign against dissidents. Lubyanka Prison, where victims of Stalin's purges, such as Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, were executed...
Even before that unexpected news, Hussein's mood had been dour as he discussed the problems of Middle East peacemaking with Wynn. "If these talks fail," the King predicted, "we are then at the end of the road, the end of Resolution 242, the end of Resolution 338 [the broad United Nations Security Council blueprint for peace] the end of hope for peace. We will be heading for disaster in terms of this area and the whole world...
Because so much of this action will be dominated by the Senate, its dour and aloof majority leader, Robert Carlyle Byrd of West Virginia, 60, will become the most important power broker in Congress. The last session belonged to bluff Speaker Tip O'Neill, who worked closely with the inexperienced President and his aides, patiently teaching them how to get along with the people on Capitol Hill. O'Neill took charge of Administration measures and pushed many of them through the House, including the energy bill, which whipped through with few changes?only...
...power of television's eye persists: to the watcher, the visible thawing of the dour-looking Begin and the expansiveness of Sadat conveyed a compatibility that no communique could have made as credible. But consider the conduct of the three famous anchor people: each got an "exclusive" interview; whatever unseemly scrambling this required took place offscreen. On-camera, addressed chummily as Walter, John and Barbara, they deferentially answered back "Mr. President" or "Mr. Prime Minister," behaved like diplomats and asked soft questions, as if afraid their very questions might queer the peace. Confined to friction-free language, they repeatedly...