Word: hovel
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...their ravished land. In between there are numerous scenes of peasants and cripples, the most disturbing and effective of which is the scene on the heath when Lear comes upon Edgar and a crowd of other beggars who have taken refuge from the storm in a miserable, leaky hovel. Looking upon the unintelligible mass of bodies whose plight is so similar to our modern day "bag people," the audience finds new meaning in Lear's realization that when it rains, poor people get wet--"O, I have ta'en too little care of this!" the king exclaims...
...nation of immigrants" arrived homeless. From the Pilgrims on, they carved their shelter, their human architecture out of wilderness. Lincoln was born in a frontier hovel. Later generations crowded ten to a squalid room in Lower East Side ghettos. Yet Americans operated on a premise of expansion and progress: the private home- more important, more basic, than the automobile, that bright headlong vehicle of the dream- was the outward artifact by which Americans defined themselves...
...greedy and whined a lot. At the first sign of trouble, they threw up their hands and sacrificed a virgin or two. The peasants, weakened by long hours of hunting for roots and small rodents, mustered little culture of their own, preferring to spend their weekends puttering around the hovel and swearing. Everyone was embarassingly short...
...Janeiro. John Paul saw squalor. He climbed up a dirt road past the wooden shacks where 20,000 squatters exist under constant threat of eviction, toward a tiny parish church that serves the favela of Vidigal. On the way, he suddenly turned aside into a three-room hovel, where Elvira Almeida Lima, caught by surprise, had yet to make her bed or clear the breakfast dishes. The Pope gently kissed the old woman and blessed her. As he left she clutched a tablecloth and buried her face in it, sobbing. When he reached the church. John Paul removed the gold...
Such apparent indecision on the director's part knocks the audience off balance. It doesn't help that Cain chooses the very middle of Act III--right before Lear enter's Poor Tom's hovel--for his intermission; the mounting horror in the theater suddenly dissipates when you buy your "Jamaica Cola" in the lobby, and it's difficult to take Lear's self-dramatizing declamation right after a desultory intermission conversation, or a trip to the rest rooms. Thus such atrocities as the general guffaw that followed Lear's "Didst thou give all to thy daughters?" last Thursday night...