Word: dourness
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...daughter-in-law Luca (Mari Torocsik). The old lady lives in a twilight of memory, where past and present tend to flow together into a kind of future-imperfect tense. The room is kept clean and carefully lit, although both the room itself and the world outside look dour and gray, as if everything were being drained of color and of life, like the old lady herself...
...dismissal of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, those two dour Germanic guardians of the Oval Office, seemed mandatory. Neither wanted to quit. Haldeman, a former J. Walter Thompson ad agency vice president from Los Angeles, had participated in all of Nixon's campaigns since 1956, when he was an advanceman for Nixon's re-election as Vice President. He had become probably the second most powerful man in the Government because he determined just who could see the President or whose memos would reach Nixon's desk. Ehrlichman, a Seattle bond lawyer who had been a U.C.L.A. classmate of Haldeman...
JOHN MITCHELL, 59, former director of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (C.R.P.) and a onetime law partner of Richard Nixon's in the Manhattan firm of Nixon Mudge Rose Guthrie and Mitchell. A dour, pipe-puffing municipal-bond lawyer, Mitchell was also Nixon's closest political confidant. As Attorney General from 1969 until early 1972, he was the exemplar of the tough law-and-order man, who claimed the authority to tap the telephone of anyone whom he considered a security risk...
...folks' death house. That will give you some brief notion of Dr. Hero. Yes, the central figure is our old friend and sometime bore, Everyman; but dismiss your initial, legitimate worries. This Everyman is no gullible Candide looking for the best of all possible worlds, no dour Diogenes straining for a glimpse of an honest man by lamplight. This guy is as slyly glib as a carnival barker, as horny as Portnoy, as resilient as a trampoline. Yet he knows Shakespeare's prophecy for Everyman: "We owe God a death...
QUEEN MARGUERITE is the most complex character in Exit the King. As the play proceeds she must change from death's morbid apologist to a magnanimous prophet. But Marlene Nelson as Marguerite maintains a uniformly dour and malignant tenor, never clearly establishing what she feels or wants. Ionesco is vague on these points, but she should clarify the uncertainty. Her work in the final scene in the play, when she tells the king and the audience what it is to die, is the biggest let-down of the evening...