Word: half
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Pullover. Near Milan, Italy, a nearsighted locomotive engineer stopped his train for half an hour at a grade crossing because he mistook for a stop signal the red sweater of a motorist halted at the crossing waiting for the train to pass...
...Nkrumah, solemnly warned: "Do not let us forget that colonialism and imperialism may come to us in a different guise, not necessarily from Europe." When asked what he thought about the Africans from Cairo, Mboya bluntly declared that "they don't represent Kenya." As the conference went on half a mile away, Nkrumah whisked ratification for his union with the former French colony of Guinea† through his obedient Parliament, but unimpressed delegates from the Federation of Nigeria-itself on the edge of independence within the British Commonwealth-observed that the Ghana-Guinea union of 7,000,000 Africans...
Wham! Pearl Harbor. Half the world away from Otaru, in a bumpy California crossroads hamlet called Cressy (pop. 400), chunky little Chiyoko Suzuki began her rehearsals for Flower Drum just 28 years ago. Youngest of a fair-sized Japanese-American family (a brother twelve years older, and two sisters, eight and ten years older), "Chiby" (Squirt) Suzuki was a loner from the start-a kid who seemed to figure she was expected to take care of herself. She went to a two-room schoolhouse, rode horses bareback, learned to swim in irrigation canals on her father's 100-acre...
Taken as a theater piece, J.B. has an often stunning theatricality, notably in the first half. The spoken verse is sometimes sharp and eloquent. The circus setting, in Boris Aronson's graphically somber set, enhances both the Biblical immensities and the modern-day horror. The bearers of ill tidings to J.B.-liquored-up soldiers, flashbulb photographers, raincoated police-are peculiarly scarifying. Moreover, J.B.'s story is varied, heightened, salted, glossed by the exchanges between the Zuss of Raymond Massey and-the play's top performance-the Nickles of Christopher Plummer...
This final note of affirmation seems somewhat unsatisfying, less on philosophical grounds than because it lacks dramatic truth; it does not have the strong pulse of the play behind it. For that matter, the second half of J.B. rather lacks a strong pulse. So long as J.B. is being struck down, J.B. is theatrically vibrant. But once he lies on the ground crying out why, the problem arises of giving utterance the effect of action. J.B.'s plight smacks, in dramatic terms, of the kind of situation-"in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done...