Word: jeane
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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America Hurrah, by Jean-Claude van Itallie, is a three-playlet wedding between pop art and the theater of cruelty. It is an off-Broadway trip through an air-conditioned blightmare towards an icy emptiness at the core of American life, the land of the Deepfreeze and the home of the rave, of the neon smile and the plastic heart...
...many of the shows are being dropped, in fact, that Milton Berle, one of the victims, has proposed that all his fellow dumpees sign off together in one single special titled Exit Laughing or the Nielsen Follies. Berle's company includes Tammy Grimes, Jean Arthur, Roger Miller, Shane, Hawk, Twelve O' Clock High, The Hero, The Rounders, Run, Buddy, Run and The Man Who Never Was. All are going off the air, leaving the field to such high-type shows as Gilligan's Island, Green Acres and Peyton Place...
...voice, can now be seen as a deliberate esthetic contrivance. The object? To convey by a massive weight of incident the feebleness of the individual within the com plex web of modern industrial society, technologically sophisticated but barbarous in human terms, its impersonality the enemy of the person. Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the few leftist intellectuals to take any interest in the later Dos Passos, once said of his work: "I know of none-not even Kafka's or Faulkner's-in which the art is greater or better hidden. I know of none that is more...
Sartre's cage is the problem of life lived in the face of imminent violent death. A group of Underground fighters are caught after a bloody, but unsuccessful mission. Only their leader, Jean (Carl Nagin, also the play's translator) escapes. Later he is taken into the cage under an assumed identity, watches his comrades and lover as they go out to be tortured, and then flees. Of the others, one Sorbier (Dominic Meiman) commits suicide rather than talk, and a young boy (Edward Jay) is killed by his fellows rather than be permitted to talk. The three others...
...role of Jean is a confused one. Ostensibly the group leader, he is ostracized by the group for avoiding their fate of torture. Jean weakly begs for approval. But since Nagin never appears as a leader, his half-hearted gestures leave one guessing whether he is acting weak or weakly acting...