Word: joans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...keep that compact with the audience. Most of Night Watch seems like a rehash of Gaslight, with a neurasthenic wife being driven totally batty by her calculating husband and his mistress (Elaine Kerr). An unprepared-for ending quite reverses this premise. As the lady with frayed nerve ends, Joan Hackett is convincingly twitchy, but she overworks the part to camouflage how underwritten the play is. In superior forms of suspense, the audience is tipped to what the characters do not know. In inferior forms, like Night Watch, the audience is in the dark and must wait, none too pleasurably...
...sense of excitement and communion begins to dim, she climbs into her car, station wagon, Land Rover, bus, taxi-and goes home. And it hits her. She arrives home to pay the sitter or what-have-you, to take over the children, to keel the pot like greasy Joan, to put the kettle on like Polly, to take up the reins of her existence. Only -something is wrong...
...other, to tell the sex of an artist by looking at her or his work. Who was more "feminine" in paint handling, Renoir or Sonia Delaunay? In terms of the stereotype, the answer would have to be Renoir. It is easy, once one has seen the name of Joan Snyder affixed to her recent painting Smashed Strokes Hope, 1972, to attribute a feminine sensibility to those glowing, flecked, dispersed blotches and runs of green, gold and crimson. But when this painting is set alongside other recent abstracts by (male) New York artists, the distinction is fatuous: Snyder's work...
...serene, witty goddesses of reason, but he usually defined them solely by their relationships to men. Candida's final choice is to stay with the bumbling preacher husband who needs her rather than flee with the fiery bohemian poet who can fend for himself. There are exceptions. St. Joan wins martyrdom, and Major Barbara wins control of a munitions empire, both rather atypical social pursuits. And that tells us something. Drama is a reflexive, not an innovative art form, and a playwright can rarely advance much beyond the boundaries that society has reached in its consensus of values...
...Came to Stay and Mary McCarthy's A Charmed Life introduced to a wide audience the intelligent, exacting female who assumes that all the best minds are androgynous and finds nothing but trouble as a result. Now the growing list includes Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion, Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, Cynthia Buchanan and Joyce Carol Gates...