Word: gelber
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Seattle, Wash., Old Seattle Theater: The Connection, Jack Gelber's jeremiad for junkies...
Nevertheless, the Neo-Realists are serving a purpose in trying to re-examine dreary literary habits, to rework the weary forms, the traditional plots, to stand time on its head and cut capers-as Ionesco, Beckett and Gelber have done in the theater. Whatever results finally, readers at least can be grateful that Neo-Realism's Big Three have discarded as outworn one increasingly obnoxious habit of the standard novelists. They do not bother to describe sex in morbid detail. That alone, if it catches on, could set the novel ahead ten years...
...Broadway original, the film version of Jack Gelber's junkie play, The Connection, goes for verisimilitude down to the last four-letter word. One word, a four-letter dysphemism for human excrement, occurs repeatedly, since in the context of Gelber's story it is slang for "snow" -which is a euphemism for any narcotic...
Miss Clarke's screenplay is an improvement on the Miller novel, just as The Connection was an improvement on the Gelber play. She has tightened the structure and cut out a mawkish ending...
...gaudy African headdress wheels on an outsize baby stroller containing an intricately entwined couple and shouts: "Doctor! Doctor! Two of my villagers are stuck together!" The critics were not amused ("nightmarish frenzy"; "vast perversity"), but the vigor of their responses suggests that 29-year-old Playwright Gelber has touched some exposed nerve ends of the contemporary scene as he did in his first play about dope addicts, The Connection. Gelber likes to break the neck off the bottle of experience and jab the audience with the jagged edges, including several unhousebroken words. The result may not be drama...