Word: godly
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...French playwright Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage is at least livelier, though it's set in a similarly claustrophobic world of refined, self-involved people. Two upper-middle-class couples (transplanted, in the U.S. translation, from Paris to Brooklyn) get together in the tastefully decorated living room of one to calmly discuss how to resolve a schoolyard fracas between their two boys. One of the parents is a corporate lawyer who can't extricate himself from his cell phone. Another is a socially committed writer who proudly displays a collection of art books on the coffee table. A third...
...first five minutes of Neil LaBute's Reasons to Be Pretty has more real, squirm-inducing human behavior on display than in all the sitcom Sturm und Drang of God of Carnage. We're plunged into the middle of a screaming fight between Greg and Steph, 20-somethings who have been living together for four years. She is furious over a disparaging comment (repeated to her by a girlfriend) he apparently made about her looks. LaBute's sharp dialogue avoids zingers but captures the way people really act when they are hurt and angry: irrational, inarticulate, unconsciously (and often consciously...
...America's great chronicler of the unbridgeable chasm between the sexes. Men treat women terribly, or are manipulated by them, or simply can't be honest with them. Kent, Greg's friend at the big-box store where they work - the kind of place the people in Impressionism or God of Carnage have probably never walked into - is one of LaBute's signature characters: the brutish user of women, cheating on his wife (a cute security guard at the store) and enlisting the weakling Greg in his deception. LaBute's plays often take surprise twists, but not here; the characters...
...puzzle editor and the man who introduced Sudoku to America—gave a short talk about his favorite crossword puzzle experiences. Flyby slowly realized, as the audience responded to Shortz with roars of laughter and knowing shouts of approval, that we were in the presence of a cruciverbalist god...
...head?The Angel reveals a prophetic book to Prior—hidden, oddly enough, in a suitcase beneath the tiles in his kitchen—and announces that he is a Prophet. His message is stasis; humans, with all their change and movement across the Earth, have compelled God to leave heaven and abandon the Angels. Why continue to live, the Angel asks, when life is so painful? Whether or not Prior has temporarily lost his mind, this vision provides him, and the audience, with a compelling sense of truth that is lacking in the rest of his life.As...