Word: faddist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Count Dracula, a vampire, has at no time lost its fascination. However, it seems to be enjoying an unusual vogue at the moment, with two productions in New York this month, a third soon to come, and movie and television shows in the offing. Whether or not a faddist gothic revival is under way, there is a pervasive skepticism about unrationed faith in rationality and a blind unqualified faith in science that engages the popular mind at the present moment. One character in the Broadway Dracula sums it up this way: "The scientific facts of the future are the superstitions...
...suddenly turned into a value-judgment spouting, semi-literate mouthpiece of the additive lobby. You've got to read it to believe it. It does everything from quoting the "prestigious New England Journal of Medicine" paraphrasing Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes entirely out of context to in-pugning that "health faddist, Gloria Swanson, somewhat better known at that time (and before) for her dramatic abilities." It was people of Swanson's ilk, we are told, who had to spoil it for everybody: they lobbied for that silly Delaney Clause (banning any amount of known cancer producing additives from food consumed...
...chairman of the Nutrition Department, Robert P. Geyer, also said they have no objection to such a listing if it is not made public. Geyer added that he might support declassifying the forms if the data is used "in a responsible way." "If there is information that the food faddist types would use in some detrimental way, that would be bad," he added...
...basis of this evidence it would be easy to kiss off the play as just another sample of faddist effluvia. But Rabe has more gravity and force than that, as he has shown in his Viet Nam plays, Sticks and Bones and The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. He has a wildly exhilarating, surrealistic humor that has not been exhibited in the U.S. theater since Edward Albee wrote The Sandbox, Zoo Story and An American Dream. He has a painful awareness of familial alienation, a kind of psychic wound that will not heal. His last play, a disaster, was significantly...
...success to another (Pop, Happenings, Environmentalists, Conceptualists, Structuralists) so that you get seasick keeping up. Once, it took a century for an art to outdo itself, to reach that state of exaggeration from which a new style might explode. Now, you trade in art vocabularies like the diet faddist adjusting eating habits. It's enough to make anybody jumpy with anxiety. And anxiety is no good breeder of art lovers. But anxiety is what we've got. For all the difference it would have made the Whitney might have been empty...