Word: jakes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...many ways his movie is the most conventional of the lot. Chance does not place an infant on the suburban doorstep of Jake Briggs (Kevin Bacon). His wife Kristy (Elizabeth McGovern), goaded on by her folks and his, makes him work embarrassingly hard at producing an offspring -- all to help her fulfill her motherly instincts (Jake has a not too hilarious problem with his sperm count). But having been, at best, an ambivalent bridegroom (goodbye novel writing, hello advertising; goodbye sex as sport, hello sex as duty, with Chain Gang for scoring), he has an underdeveloped feeling for fatherhood...
...program is ending now because we're really ahead of schedule, Jake Smith, associate dean of the College of Communications. The school was expecting to take 18 months to train the resistance members, but the project actually required less than a year, Smith said...
...then there are the requisite Shepard characters. There is Jake (Chad Raphael), the Violent Drifter, who has just beaten his wife, Flighty But Passionate Beth (Heather Gunn), so mercilessly that he thinks he has killed her. Their respective families run to their aid. On Jake's side there's his Loyal But Timid brother Frankie (Daniel Hurewitz), his Embittered sister Sally (Diane Paulus), and his Oedipally Overnurturing Mother Lorraine (Susan Schwartz). Their counterparts in Beth's family are her Vengeful brother Mike (Sam Sifton), her Death-Obsessed Hunter father Baylor (Jon Tolins), and her Fearful And Self-Deluding mother...
...houses on the stage are especially effective, since, as my companion pointed out, they demonstrate the paranoid, skewed perspectives of their inhabitants, Jake and Beth. The houses are built on a superhuman scale, with the doorways, windows, walls, and even the floors at bizarre angles to each other. The houses are placed far enough from each other that they seem hundreds of miles apart--which, as the script suggests, they are--yet they are close enough for Jake, imagining he sees Beth, to actually look over to her house...
Cynics will find some of the play's more overt symbolic actions silly. Jake opens a box of his father's ashes and blows. An American flag somehow finds itself draped like a blanket around Jake's shoulder's and later stuffed like a bridle into his mouth or tied like an old rag around Mike's rifle barrel. But these tend to be balanced by moments in which the play takes itself less seriously, as when Lorraine says of Beth and Jake, "A woman who lives with a man like that deserves to be killed," or when Baylor rhapsodizes...