Word: friends
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...friend the classics purist is upset that the Classical Club's production of Sophokles' tragedy Aias doesn't have an all-male cast, as it did during its original run. But Aias isn't the Hasty Pudding show, I answer--although the overactors in this play rival the Pudding's in the way they exaggerate their characters to the point of comic caricature...
...surprisingly, Odysseus is a bit incredulous when Athena (Leta Fincher) explains it all to him. For a goddess of wisdom, Fincher's Athena seems unduly bloodthirsty, even going so far as to chide Odysseus for his timid revulsion. She's supposed to be that way, says my friend the purist, but this Athena revels in the bloodshed so much that she would horrify Lady Macbeth...
...Aias considers suicide, despite the pleas of his wife Tekmessa (Jenny Bader) and his sailors, who form the traditional chorus. Bader is a delight as she reveals the long-hidden pleasures of screaming in anguish, but the chorus are a mixed lot. The women sailors ("Oh, no!" cries my friend the purist) tend to chew the scenery; the men are wooden. All seem incongruous, with their Japanese baseball uniform-style costumes and their song-and-dance routines. My friend the purist says that there would have been music and dancing in the original, but I wonder if they would have...
When President Raul Alfonsin peacefully quelled an army rebellion two weeks ago and 200,000 civilian supporters thronged the streets of Buenos Aires, some citizens began to chant, "Raul, friend, the country is with you!" Last week a gathering of 200 angry sympathizers with the military rebels had a different message for the Argentine leader. Their cry: "Death to Alfonsin! Long live the armed forces!" The defiant slogans neatly defined the crisis that now confronts Argentina's still fragile 40-month-old democracy. At issue are government efforts to prosecute some 400 military officers for their role in kidnaping, torturing...
Cannily commercial, Project X has almost too much old gold going for it: strands of The Miracle Worker, Fail Safe, The Elephant Man, Top Gun and the collected works of Steven Spielberg. Like E.T., this is the story of a childlike alien and his lonely human friend who must protect the creature, like a wise father with a brilliant, battered child, and then set it free. But Writers Stanley Weiser and Lawrence Lasker (WarGames) resist nearly every temptation to truckle, and Director Jonathan Kaplan (Heart Like a Wheel) finds each scene's emotional core while surrounding it with meticulous technique...