Word: hysteria
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...laissez-faire approach that lets the play, through a remarkably strong and consistent group of actors, do the talking. Interpretation and polish have been concentrated, where they belong, in the difficult timing of conversations in which characters constantly interrupt one another and in the placement of peaks of hysteria in a steady crescendo of tension that could have deteriorated into a two-and-a-half hour endurance contest of lung power...
...with them a crude air as of a settlement in the woods of people of strange blood, a settlement which was not really a success." Reconstructing a gathering his family had held some 20 years earlier, he recalls a tableau: his father depressed, his mother on the verge of hysteria. Even the Francoeurs' idea of Catholicism cannot comfort: "It was a religion, not of recourse, but stark truth: death is what we live for, and as terrible as it is, to die is better than to live...
...good many words and some carefully worked literary effects to evoke Sarah's strangeness: "It was an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon, the lack of reason for such sorrow...
There are explanations, all of them ugly. Economic greed. Racism. Wartime hysteria. Americans of German or Italian ancestry did not suffer mass incarceration, but the shock of Pearl Harbor inflamed the century-old hatred of Oriental immigrants-the "yellow peril...
...sense of monstrousness that arises from her work seems to have its source in an unbridgeable gap between the highly rational and ordered intelligence of the writer, and the chaos and hysteria of nearly everything she writes about. Thus, perhaps, her chronic melodrama, her pumping of more emotion into situations than they have been built to withstand...