Word: goforth
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Williams, is his first unequivocally symbolic and undeviatingly religious allegory. It will certainly repel devotees of realism. It will equally certainly make Hermione Baddeley the most envied actress on the island of Manhattan, since she has been given another of the playwright's memorable roles for women, Flora Goforth, whom she portrays with blinding blistering brilliance. Playgoers inured to the calculated trivia of Broadway may be infuriated, touched to the quick, or turned stone-deaf at being asked, in all seriousness, to contemplate the state of their souls at the moment of impending death...
This is the condition of Flora Goforth, who must meet not her publisher's deadlines, as she likes to think, but her Maker's, as in her terror-gnawed bones she knows. Flora is a vulgar, bawdy, explosive clown in her 60s, an eternal show girl, who has buried six husbands and who, fingers warty with jewels, is still desperately, greedily, and somehow gallantly grabbing at life in a mountaintop villa in Italy. Indeed, she has three villas, pink, blue and white, all wired up in a walkie-talkie intercom system into which she dictates at all hours...
...Milk Train speeds toward a surprisingly different destination: an allegory of the temptation of Christ. As Boston Drama Critic George E. Ryan of The Pilot perceptively noted during the pre-Broadway tryouts, Chris is both St. Christopher and a Christ figure. Christopher means Christ-bearer. Chris arrives at Flora Goforth's burdened with a pack so weighty that he stumbles. In legend, St. Christopher carries a child across a river, and suddenly, finding the weight almost too great to bear, discovers that he is carrying Jesus, who in turn bears the sins of the world...
...Cissy Goforth is 60 years old but she dresses like a teenager in tight, white Capri pants and high heels. She lives in a stupendous villa on the Italian coast. Like the Wife of Bath, she has had a spray of husbands and she boasts that she keeps her splendid body in shape through "plenty of exercise...
...conversion of Cissy Goforth is a bizarre jape, an eccentric and perhaps sophomoric joke. In the fall (if all goes as planned), Broadway audiences will be able to see for themselves whether they find it possible to pity, or to laugh...