Word: humoredly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME! When a man buries his past, he rarely faces the future dry-eyed. But Brian Friel applies the saving sponge of humor to the Irish sentiment pouring from his play, and Dubliners Donal Donnelly and Patrick Bedford, as twin images of the hero, stir up a fine farrago of laughter and tears...
This play contains several obvious, though still dangerous, pitfalls. It was written 130 years ago for a theatre with habits and tastes unlike our own, and its humor can seem obscure and repetitive. The scenes are really tableaux, and a good deal of imaginary action takes place between them. A careless production, one that goes for the big laughs and lets the dialogue fend for itself, would thoroughly confuse everyone...
...portrayal of the mayor's domineering, vain, and dissatisfied wife. But the scene-stealing prize goes to Lynn Milgrim as the mayor's bovine daughter. Her acting includes more than the clomping, the staring, and the whining she does so well; she is a pretty girl who captures the humor and pathos of being plain. That is no mean feat...
Shuman was a bit too slight for the brash young contractor he portrayed. his acting was more strained than the others'. He became too agitated in some of Mick's speeches which should be played with a biting, deadpan humor. But his carriage was properly deadpan--a slump-shouldered, flat-footed walk. And most essential, he captured Mick's love for his brother, reflected in the abrupt concerned, slowing down of his speech whenever the bewildered Davies took one of the younger brother's fanciful harangues as an attack on Aster...
...royal princess as an occasion when native women writhe "to a weird howling which it would be rather complimentary to call singing." Sometimes he reported earnestly, filing statistic-studded essays on the whaling and sugar industries. He was at his best when he gave in to his sense of humor. Of lower-class Hawaiians traveling on an inter-island schooner, he reported that "as soon as we set sail the natives all laid down on deck as thick as Negroes in a slave pen, and smoked and conversed and captured vermin and ate them, spit on each other, and were...