Word: elegiac
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from which he stares like an eagle just slightly startled to find himself prematurely taxidermized-has also conspired to suggest that his plays have a savor too rarefied for the palates of most theatergoing mortals. It is true that in writing, staging and performance, his plays are ethereal, austere, elegiac, pioneering a dramatic form that whittles existence into essence. But this is to say only that Beckett is a master of theatrical effect and a poet of the darkest human emotions. Though his characters are haunted specters speaking in liturgical monotone, there is music in the monotones; there is passion...
Fools of Fortune unfolds with the inevitability of Attic drama. The elegiac chapters and the grieving mood are expertly drawn, though dolefully unchanging. Similarly, the characters have perfect tragic pitch but limited range. They are, as Trevor obviously intended, ghostly creations speaking beyond pasion and hope. -By R.Z. Sheppard...
...second-act slump that lasts about three hours. But the best and the most of Berlin is the best that Fassbinder-or just about anyone else lately-has done. He balances the weight of Döblin's carefully repetitious dialogue with the buoyancy of his creamy, elegiac visual style. He interrupts the naturalism of lives on the skids with scenes of shocking surrealism: an old goat-man slaughters a calf; Mieze's corpse turns to soft-focus glitter, as if she had become in death a Hollywood star; a scorpion clambers up the entwined legs...
...Middle Ages, like A.R. Gurney Jr.'s other plays about the declining Protestant elite (Scenes from American Life, the current off-Broadway hit The Dining Room), is a wistful, elegiac comedy that preserves a tight-lipped emotional reserve: confrontations that could be tragic are played for rueful laughter. Unlike most of Gurney's other plays, however, The Middle Ages has a well-knit, symmetrical plot. It offers two love stories, a star-crossed one between a clownish boy and the girl who occasionally impels him to grow up, and another, almost accidental, between the boy's father...
DIED. John Cheever, 70, elegiac storyteller of suburbia; after a long illness; in Ossining, N.Y. (see BOOKS...