Word: ennui
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...with a beer. Funny, but the humor fades long before the actors do. Not even the sudden introduction of Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, as well as instant parodies of Mamet and Beckett tossed in like ingredients in Ubu's wild bouillabaise, can save it from ennui. Every now and then, though, Durang's original wit shines through the sledge-hammer production, as when Andreassi suddenly transforms into Brick from Cat: "What happened between Skipper and me was good! It was pure! Okay, so we dressed up as lumberjacks and french-kissed for an hour...
...incisive comments on death, co-ops, language and television packed in into a General Hospital setting, it's clear that DeLillo has found another metaphor for attacking the metaphysical clutter of modern American life. From the mysterious link between football and nuclear war in End Zone, to the ennui of Star Wars style warfare in "Human Moments in World War III," DeLillo has proved himself to be the modern American master of fear and loathing...
...ironies, its pacing mired in quicksand. Maria Luisa Bemberg (who directed a fiery Oscar nominee, the 1984 Camila) never secures her characters in the larger landscape. The Peronistas stay offscreen, darn the luck, while the upper-crusters sit idly by, aspiring to Coward's wit and Chekhov's melancholy. Ennui finally devours them all, long after it has consumed the viewer. By Richard Corliss...
...fifth collection of short stories, Alice Munro, 55, continues to buck the genre's fashionable trend toward miniaturization and microplots. Her characters stubbornly refuse to trudge like zombies through brief but nonetheless tedious interludes. They do not act like literary artifacts or wan verbal gestures toward ennui. They behave, instead, as if they had all the time and space imaginable to lead and ponder their complicated lives. Each of the eleven pieces in The Progress of Love seems to contain enough material for a fair-sized novel; Munro's art of compression emphasizes amplitudes rather than economies...
...affection for that city of "people, traffic, and restaurants," Allen cannot conceal the fact that New York City can be a lonely place. It is a place of lonely singles who entrust their lives to doctors and analysts, where highbrow culture is merely an expensive distraction from ennui, and where material riches can not compensate for spiritual bankruptcy...