Word: genteel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...drills to re-examine such banalities as shrink-wrap, vacuuming the pathetic Christina out of Wyeth's "Christina's World." Frequent musical segments with deep primal bass lines and irregular-heartbeat drums overwhelm the audience in a purely sensory world, freeing them from the burden of too much thinking. Genteel Boston audiences have become devotees of the Blue Man Experience, tying on paper head-bands, singing along with electronic prompters and dancing in an in-house ticker tape parade. They seem to revel in the group participation, in the sense of collective experience gained from seeing their world inside...
...grandmother and aunt (Ellen Burstyn and Anne Bancroft), working on her thesis and getting her head together. As things work out, she seems to devote most of her time to gathering instructive reminiscences from them and the rest of the ladies in their quilting bee. They are neither so genteel nor stridently feminist as you might fear...
...Grace? Grace is simply beside herself. At her genteel woman's club she asks anyone else who has been sleeping with her husband to please identify herself. She also airs all the ladies' sexual secrets. The uproar is hilarious. Back at the ranch, she asserts herself--and the reality principle--more hesitantly...
Maybe suburbia is a genteel sham, or maybe not. Adherence to 12-step programs could be, as someone says here, "just another form of addiction." The Wrenwood patients could be searchers or fools, the staff fakers or dupes-or healers. The brazen majesty of Haynes' approach is that he spills no secrets, makes no obvious judgments. Safe is its own unique thing, as seductive as the sherbety decor of Carol's home, as mysterious as the illness that seizes her. It will also seize any viewer who dares to surrender to its spell. Feel free to laugh or scream...
...1920s New Orleans, Williams' play is a work of psychological warfare. When the genteel Blanche Dubois mysteriously insinuates herself into the lives of her younger sister, Stella, and Stella's husband, Stanley Kowalski, she precipitates her own fall, begun twenty years earlier on the family plantation. Part of the difficulty of the play lies in the sense that everything following the inital fall from glory is simply a decades long after-shock...