Word: inhabitation
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Many of the characters in this year's plays inhabit a landscape of dead or deferred dreams. In John Pielmeier's Courage, the Scots playwright James M. Barrie laments "the fierce joy of loving too much. It is a terrible thing!" Courage avoids the standard pitfall of the full-length monologue: that of making its subject too ingratiating. It keeps Barrie at a respectful distance from his audience and his own feelings until late in the play, when he relates the awful fates of the four children who inspired characters in his Peter Pan. Actor Paul Collins gives...
These people are not the same as those that inhabit the Iliad (so beloved of Cecelia's grandfather). They do not rise to the heroism of combat. Rather, heroism descends to the level of their everyday lives. The ordinary gestures of masculine courtesy take on a grand sweeping quality, and the banality of names take on an almost ritualistic significance when the men in the group have to change their to join a band of partisans. One young man, in memory of his stint as a choirboy, picks the name Requiem--a poignantly appropriate choice, as later events reveal...
...nature who trailblazes into a wilderness of the spirit and emerges stronger and wiser. Alda's modern pathfinder is also very much a man of the mid-20th century: liberally educated and not reluctant to parade it, perversely triumphant in a milieu he blithely declares himself unfit to inhabit, japing and shambling after women, with a quip and an invisible cigar, like a Wasp Groucho. In later episodes, Hawkeye occasionally looked as if he were campaigning for canonization. But he could still bend, and come near breaking, whether in realizing he had a serious drinking problem or in surrendering...
Meanwhile, Sagan has remained imperturbably on course, charting the manners of France's Beautiful People who inhabit the milieu of high fashion, advertising and show business. Those of her novels that appeared in the U.S., such as A Certain Smile, Aimez-Vous Brahms? and The Unmade Bed, came across as high-class pop fiction à la française with predictable complements of cuckolds, betrayed mistresses and golden-eyed lovers...
...fine stories in Bobbie Ann Mason's first collection are set mostly in western Kentucky, where her characters inhabit a "ruburb," an area no longer rural but not yet suburban. Times are changing, and bonds are loosening. Old farmers sell out and head for Florida in brand-new campers; the congregations of small country churches are dwindling; Trappist monks are admired for not putting preservatives in their bread; and a disabled truck driver passes the time needlepointing a Star Trek pillow cover while his wife lifts weights. A story that begins "Leroy Moffitt's wife, Norma Jean...