Word: goats
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
HOGAN'S GOAT. Ethnic memory is tapped as William Alfred evokes Irish character, customs and political clout in Brooklyn at the turn of the century. Beneath the blarney and blather lies the turbulent story of the making and unmaking of an American politician...
...Lowell's The Old Glory last season, the American Place Theater has been commendably true to its name. This is a theater group that strives to bare the roots of American experience, to record the resonances of the American locale. The strength of its current Hogan's Goat is its evocation of Irish character, customs and political power in the Brooklyn of 1890. Beneath the blather and the brogue, it is as if a well of ethnic memory had been tapped, and the making and unmaking of an American cascades turbulently across the stage...
Hogan's Goat does put on airs. It is a sentimental melodrama posing as an austere tragedy. Its blank verse is merely pumped-up prose. As playmaking, it is wildly, datedly implausible. Ethnically, it suggests that minority groups in the U.S. have a manifest destiny to disappear. The success of the dream is the death of the dream, and in one glamorous assimilationist triumph, President Kennedy abolished the limited Irish vision of local bosses, ward-heelers who could imagine no greater glory than to be nimble crumb collectors at the table of power...
...Teeth. A different kind of goat is involved in the Mad Show- the goat that satirists always hope to make out of such national pastimes as soap-flake TV operas, movie epics, ad jingles. The result: a kind of pleasant-evening-was-had-by-all occasion...
...play, which Alfred wrote 13 years ago, will be produced next year. Its production was proposed last December shortly after the success of "Hogan's Goat...