Word: eviler
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When Commodore Matthew Perry entered Edo Bay aboard the steam frigate Susquehanna just 130 years ago this summer, most of the awestruck Japanese had never before seen such a vessel, much less a whole flotilla of what they called "the black ships of evil mien...
...greater degree than in Western art, each color comes equipped with its own symbolic associations, which remain more or less constant through its use in architecture, print, neon, fabric design, packaging, food or painting. Red, for instance, pertains to magic and sorcery, vitality, fire and the conquest of evil spirits. Japanese color is grounded in nature: every indigo or cobalt dye runs, as it were, back to the sea. But the circuit between nature and abstraction is far shorter than in the West. Color has the peremptory quality of calligraphy: a gesture, an unmediated...
Court trials, for example, still upset the Japanese sense of privacy and are considered public embarrassments. They also aggravate a deeply ingrained reluctance to assess good and evil in others. Kawashima notes that unlike most Westerners, the Japanese find that "there is no tension posed between what ought to be. . . morality, on one hand, and the realities of the human spirit and human society as it exists." One practice that caters to such beliefs: proceedings in some civil cases are extensively thrashed out in chambers to avoid surprises, making court appearances anticlimactic. Says an American attorney working in Japan: "They...
While the show is generally well-done, the uneven acting prevents the play from being all it could. Brenneman convincingly handles the most difficult role of Vinnie, alternating between the emotionally childish "daddy's little girl" and the cunning, evil woman who twists people to murder or suicide. But her snarling performance leaves the audience unable to pity her character. This bleak production denies Vinnie the final redemption earned by a tragic heroine. The other demanding role, Orin, occasionally eludes Keshishian, as he has trouble at first keeping the war-weary boy diffident and still remaining in character. Happily...
...work can be seen as period agitprop, analogous to Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty. It is colored with the lyric causticity of the Brecht-Weill collaborations. Yet it is always a mistake to deride the potency of stereotypes in the theater or the power of good-vs.-evil allegories, however simpleminded. Here the premise is that Mr. Mister (David Schramm), the boss of Steeltown, U.S.A., is a cigar-chomping tyrant, and his gutsy prole of a foe, Larry Foreman (Randle Mell), is a knight in blue-collar armor. We meet Mister's toadies: mousy Reverend Salvation, sycophantic College...