Word: friendships
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...other things on his mind, mainly his approaching wedding. In the brief 90 minutes that French author Yasmina Reza's play takes to unfold, the three will debate modern art, lash out at each other with insults they will later regret, and generally explore the nature of their shaky friendship...
...ambition. The characters are all too easy to parse: Serge is a modernist but really a dilettante; Marc, a classicist who's a snob underneath; Yvan, an art-naif who goes whichever way the wind blows. The audience has little investment in the clash between them because their friendship seems implausible from the get-go: there's no explanation of how or why they became friends, no real sense of closeness. This might be tolerable if Art worked as a Shavian battle of wit and ideas, but mostly it's just three guys needling each other about everything from Serge...
...link between art and friendship could actually be a fruitful subject for a play. How many of us have felt a pang of betrayal when a close friend or loved one has failed to share our enthusiasm for a favorite movie or novel? But the issue is blunted here by the fact that the painting is treated as a joke from the start--and a dated one at that. It's the old wheeze about how abstract art appeals only to pretentious critics (and suckers like Serge), while ordinary folks see the emperor's new clothes...
...week's talks was finally revealed in a 1,500-word joint communique released just before the President left Shanghai to return to the U.S. It contained no great surprises, no great letdowns. It might have said a little more; it largely dwelled on the need for friendship without getting down to many specifics. In the long run, one of the most important questions about the U.S. and China will be just how much the two countries may learn from each other...
...answer?' She always had the answer," remembers her 11th-grade English teacher, Sue Ann Allen. Gayl came to the attention of the Lexington-born poet Elizabeth Hardwick, who became an early mentor and arranged for a college scholarship. But as an adult Gayl resisted most offers of friendship. In Ann Arbor, she lived like a nun, alone in a threadbare apartment behind a grocery store...