Word: hearths
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Most U.S. playwrights focus on home and hearth, but David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) has become an international hit portraying political megatrends...
...contrast to most American dramatists, who have excelled at depicting the struggles of home and hearth but not the larger world, Hwang thinks more shrewdly about mankind than about individual men and women. He has the steel- trap analytic grasp of the champion scholastic debater he once was, the lawyer he thought of becoming. The main weakness of his writing is that its purpose often seems more political than literary, more attuned to social issues than to the private struggles of the human heart. The final scene of M. Butterfly, when the agony of one soul finally takes precedence over...
...make more steel per worker, the industry carried out a long-overdue modernization drive. As recently as 1974, one-quarter of all steel in the U.S. was still being produced by old-fashioned open-hearth furnaces, which take eight hours to turn molten iron into steel, compared with 45 minutes for the more efficient oxygen-fired furnaces. Since 1982, American steel companies have poured $9 billion into upgrading their mills. Open hearths now produce only 5% of domestic steel...
...people individually. Enriching the American dramatic vocabulary with Latin techniques and traditions, these new playwrights also emulate their U.S. forebears: as in the heritage stretching from O'Neill and Tennessee Williams to Sam Shepard and August Wilson, the overwhelming concern is the family, and the perpetual battleground is the hearth. The nominal topic of debate may be a fighting cock rather than a football game, but the passions of these playwrights are genuine Americana...
Andy Farmer (Chevy Chase) sits by the fireplace; his lazy, lovable pet, Yellow Dog, dozes at his feet. An odor catches Andy's attention -- hmmm, something's burning. The master of this Vermont farmhouse eases on over to the hearth, extracts Yellow Dog's tail from the cinders and gently stubs it out like a spent cigar. The pooch barely opens one glazed eye. This scene, briefer than a minute, is a vagrant moment of unforced drollery in Funny Farm's carnival of sylvan horrors...