Word: hellzapoppin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Camino Real is Playwright Tennessee Williams' most agitated protest and least effective play. In it Williams is in flight, more than ever before, from theatrical realism. At the same time, he is appalled as never before by reality itself. Using the gaudiest of theater tricks-florid language, Hellzapoppin explosions, surrealist juxtapositions-he has shattered the familiar outer shell of life to reveal decadence and rottenness within. But in doing so, he has partly succumbed as a writer to what as a moralist he would expose...
...Flood. After such a quiet play, Wilder's rambunctious The Skin of Our Teeth proved to be a jolt-so much so that some 75 backers promptly backed away. It was a sort of Hellzapoppin with brains, the story of Everyman (Mr. Antrobus) and the whole human race. Its action spread over 5,000 years, took in the Flood, the Ice Age and Armageddon. "Our Town" says Wilder, "is the life of the family seen from a telescope five miles away. The Skin of Our Teeth is the destiny of the whole human group seen from a telescope...
Pardon Our French (produced by Ole Olsen & Chic Johnson) isn't nearly humble enough. Pardon Our Effrontery is the least it should entreat for, and there would be nothing intemperate about Pardon Our Existence. Olsen & Johnson, after achieving the utmost in noise and nuttiness with their Hellzapoppin cycle, have now plunged to the depths of unpalatable boredom. Adopting different and sedater tactics, abandoning the raucous for the merely raw, they have a way of making everything they touch turn to lead...