Word: faulk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Seven years ago, John Henry Faulk was making $36,000 a year as a radio and television monologuist and comic chatterer. Suddenly, his radio-TV income dropped to zero. He had been blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer in a pamphlet published by AWARE, Inc., a private group of lawyers, professors, businessmen and actors whose declared objective was "to combat the Communist conspiracy in entertainment communications...
...Faulk brought suit for libel against AWARE, Inc., and against Vincent Hartnett, writer of the pamphlet, and Laurence Johnson, a Syracuse supermarket operator and AWARE, Inc. member, who energetically circulated Hartnett's pamphlet to TV sponsors. The case finally came to trial last April...
AWARE, Inc.'s shadowy terrorism once had the entire television industry quivering in fear, but until the Faulk case no one had ever had the courage to bite back. Faulk's attorney was Louis Nizer, who had earlier helped Quentin Reynolds win a $175,001 verdict in his 1954 suit against Columnist Westbrook Pegler, the highest award ever made by a jury in a libel case...
There are some Williams-patented shockers in Iguana, but they are muted in the air of near-Oriental serenity that envelops the play. There is a speech of Widow Faulk's in which she tells of overhearing Shannon's account of how his mother caught him practicing "the little boy's vice" and spanked him with a hairbrush for angering "both God and Mama." Shannon's explanation of his adult behavior is that he "got back at God by preaching atheistical sermons and got back at Mama by starting to lay young girls.'' Then...
Iguana has the hue of hope. At the end, Shannon stays with the Widow Faulk to help make a go of the hotel. Nonno completes his poem. Though he dies and Hannah must go on alone, she has been given the strength to do it. Yet it is the anguished daily testing of existence itself that Hannah seems fearful of as she utters the last lines of the play. Lifting her eyes toward the heavens, she pleads, "Oh God, can't we stop now? Finally? Please let us! It's so quiet here...