Word: human
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There are those, of course, who would like to see slogan eering die off entirely. Precisely because the art appeals to emotion, some idealists and intellectual purists disdain it in favor of cool, rational discourse. This crowd is clearly trying to swim against a very strong human current. Moreover, they are out of touch with the problems of both leadership and the human dilemma. The problem has never been to get people to think about doing something. The difficulty has always been to get them to act. From time immemorial, leaders have found that one of the best ways...
Under Chief of Police John Rhoades, a Kelly appointee, the department instituted a mandatory, 20-hour human relations course for all members, and integrated classes of police recruits. Many policemen condemned Rhoades for being, as one officer put it, "Kelly's puppet" and "too responsive to the community at the expense of the department's needs...
...role of Sinclair Lewis in Strangers has all the individual ingredients for a bring-down-the-house, Tony-award-winning performance, but they never coalesce into a complex, recognizably human character. Yellen hasn't given him any shading; the role is all in the snappy dialogue with nothing in between the lines. Lewis and Thompson (Lois Nettleton) bicker through an interminable "seduction" scene in her Berlin apartment, fly off to Moscow where he gets drunk and insults the Commies, return to Berlin where he gets drunk and insults her, get married and move to Vermont where she misses her journalism...
...TRAGEDY, according to Yellen, is that Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson, two brilliant writers and decent, caring human beings, were unable to know each other, to love each other. He attempts to explain Lewis' problem in the final scene, where Dern, who has gotten drunk and become violent, sits strapped in a straitjacket and launches into a lengthy monologue as Lewis's father, revealing the old man's perpetual dissatisfaction with his son. The speech should be a tour-de-force--Dern does a beautiful job with it--but it is so empty in concept, so obvious in construction, that...
...meaningful" lines are slick and stilted: "You drink to be more than yourself, but it only makes you so much less than you are," "I don't know how to love," etc. The play never casts light or the writing of Sinclair Lewis, and the characters are not sufficiently human or interesting enough to survive without the glamorous names. There's nothing inherently "dramatic" in Strangers except that the two leading characters talk a lot and the rapid flow of scenes--her apartment, to a cafe, an airfield, Moscow, Nazi Germany--evoke a diluted Julia...