Word: eliza
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Such reticence makes Adams' Eliza Hamilton Quarles a pallid, rather bloodless character. As a woman who came of age 20 years ago, Eliza is well versed in the arts of discretion and coping. She has to be. Her sexually ambivalent husband killed himself after becoming keen on a beautiful boy, leaving her with a baby daughter and an unfulfilled life. Eliza has little instinct for what her mother Josephine calls the "social realities." Josephine is formidable: a successful writer with another daughter and a number of former husbands left in or under the dust. She is also a hardheaded...
...Eliza confronts the injuries of class in an avowedly egalitarian society when she moves to San Francisco and takes a job in a doctor's office. Her co-workers -a working-class white and a ghetto black-initially mistrust her Eastern accent and sense of style. But Harry Argent, a blunt, flamboyant movie producer, is intermittently attracted to Eliza for what she is: "A sort of zaftig Jane Fonda," who needs not only a vocation but also...
Moynihan's Eliza commands the action because of the connections she suggests; Andrew Agush claims the stage as Higgins precisely because he has forged no links. Agush's absent-minded professor moves entirely in a world of his own making. Fixed on the idea rather than the person who's talking, his tongue whetting his lips and his eyes twitching, Agush's Higgins can only understand Eliza's predicament once it is placed in his own scheme of things. "Take your hands out of your pockets, Henry," his mother scolds and Higgins obeys. But a moment later the hands...
...spite of these weak links, the Leverett production carries Shaw's main point powerfully home. After the garden party when Higgins hugs all the laurels to himself, Eliza runs away to his mother's house. There they confront each other head on, finally recognizing their mutual lack of understanding. When Eliza, hurt and angry, says she will marry Freddy, Higgins answers "I'll wring your neck." "Wring away," Eliza says and the confrontation between Moynihan and Agush locks into place. But this time it is Higgins who yields. He realizes that she is bigger than the categories--poor girl...
...door and disappears. As the lights go down on Agush, a single question is left. It is to the credit of the Leverett production of Pygmalion, and to Moynihan's performance, that we are left wondering not what Higgins believes or even what Shaw intended, but whether Eliza herself expects to come back...