Word: hostess
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mixes original quotes indiscriminately with recycled material from other books and articles, and fudges the notes at the end so the reader often cannot tell which is which. Still, much of the portrait -- Nancy's difficult relationship with her children, her obsessive attention to detail as a White House hostess -- rings true. Treated simply as a compendium of all the scraps a team of diligent researchers could gather about Nancy Reagan, it serves at least one historical function. It reveals that many, many people didn't like...
...designed an intergalactic Gothic set in which to develop his complex vision. Placed in a world of darkness and asymmetries, Aeschylus' familiar characters are de-familiarized, distored and dissected. Athena, once the cool, collected goddess of wisdom, is transformed into a weary, indifferent hostess. The Athenian court of justice degenerates into a cocktail party where under-the-table arm-twisting subverts the Athenian ideal of justice. The furies are not beyond consoling themselves with booze, narcotics and yogurt, not is Orestes above Oedipal fantasies for the mother whome he has murdered...
...from 1974, prefigures later and even darker works, too many not yet seen in the U.S. Lynne Meadow, who directed Woman in Mind better than Ayckbourn himself, is again shrewd, save in miscasting the clueless Peter Frechette as the guest. Fortunately, Brenda Blethyn is perfect as the nerved-up hostess. More productions like this (and fewer like the coarse, clumsy version of Taking Steps, which no fan should attend) may at last bring Ayckbourn an American acclaim...
...that they barely recall at all, his ardor is tedious -- especially when he hauls out an immense volume of snapshots of the deceased. His sentimentalizing extends to their marriages, which he extols even as they cope with revelations of sexual infidelity and suffocating possessiveness. When the cheated-upon hostess is carried upstairs, hysterical, Colin assures the others she has always been high-strung from overwork at pleasing people. Ayckbourn too fiddles the emotional gears so deftly that the mood jolts from mirth to horror and back, sentence by sentence...
Then, all of a sudden, the Iron Lady was again the kind and polite hostess...