Word: eliza
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Vonnegut's principal characters are Dr. Wilbur Swain and Eliza Swain, a brother and sister who seem to owe some of their identities to Vladimir Nabokov's Van and Ada of Ada. The aged doctor camps out in the lobby remnant of the Empire State Building and relates the disjointed fantasy of his life and times...
...tale is dominated by his relationship with his sister Eliza. Yes, it is incestuous, but as in Ada, incest has a private, figurative significance. Wilbur's and Eliza's love and loneliness are conveyed in a slurry of short scenes, part science fiction, part dreamlike shorthand, whose allusions the author seems unwilling to share fully with his reader. Instead of ideas, he offers whimsy; instead of feeling, merely sentiment. Vonnegut calls his method "situational poetry...
...Agriculture, for example, has profited immensely by women's innovations. Elinor Laurens of Ansonborough, South Carolina, became the first colonist to cultivate a wide variety of exotic fruits and vegetables-including olives, capers, limes, ginger, guinea grass and Alpine strawberries. The most exceptional female planter, however, is Mrs. Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 53, also of South Carolina. When only a girl, managing her absent father's large plantation with what one friend called "a fertile brain for scheming," Eliza decided to start cultivating West Indian indigo. At first she suffered setbacks from frost and insect blight, but within seven...
Most of the cast fill their roles with 18th century gusto. Teresa Toulouse, for example, combines the vengefulness of Gilbert and Sullivan's jilted Katisha with the coarse bumptiousness of Eliza the Flower Girl in her characterization of Lucy Lockit, Polly Peachum's rival for the love of the unfaithful highwayman Macheath. Joanna Blum as Mrs. Peachum also plays her role to the hit. Unscrupulous and unmarried, she jerks around the stage, hands on hips, spitting out cynical asides to the audience...
Repeating his original role as Pickering, Higgins' bachelor buddy, Robert Coote is delightful, and George Rose is "loverly" as Eliza's earthily vulgar father. The Lerner-Loewe score is incomparable, and the opening-night audience could scarcely wait for the first bar to applaud...