Word: julians
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...current conflict turned on two jobs-majority leader of the state senate and speaker of the state assembly. Wagner backed a couple of proven mediocrities, while a coalition headed by Buckley decided to push two other candidates who were hardly less mediocre but both good Buckley men-State Senator Julian B. Erway, 65, a conservative Albany lawyer and cattle breeder, and Assemblyman Stanley Steingut, 44, Brooklyn's influential anti-Wagner Democratic leader...
...world, is ready to grant the unearthly sum of "100 million a year" for the next 20 years to the Catholic Church. (In view of later events, this may not be money but souls.) All that remains is for the cardinal's aide, a celibate lay brother named Julian, to go to Miss Alice's enormous Renaissance chateau and arrange the details. A shy God-intoxicated man, Brother Julian (John Gielgud) does not dream that he is keeping a rendezvous with temptation, trial and death...
...mansion's walnut-paneled library, in William Ritman's massively evocative set, melds vaulting elegance with mute foreboding. The first person Julian meets is a butler named Butler (John Heffernan), who is not a butler. The first thing he sees is a scale model of the chateau, perfect in every exterior and interior detail. This permits clever wordplay on the ambiguity of appearance v. reality, but its blunt literalism sadly lacks the intellectual subtleties that Pirandello so often brought to the same theme. Julian meets Miss Alice (Irene Worth) and at the end of Act II is seduced...
...Julian marries Miss Alice in Act III, upon which she and her entourage at once prepare to leave him. They call themselves "agents"; they are certainly worldlings; they may be Fate's Furies. Holding a mock trial and firing a mortal bullet into Julian's stomach, they proceed to teach him what Albee believes he knows. Man is alone. The universe is a void. Whatever illusion or symbolic replica of faith man invents to still his fears and help him accept the inevitability of his destiny may be called Tiny Alice...
Albee has written a drama of the post-Christian mentality, but its only emotional vitality derives from Christian symbolism and experience. When Julian is shot, Miss Alice is wearing a dress and cape of blue, a color associated with Mary, the mother of Christ, and she cradles Julian in her arms in the agony of a Pietá. Other invocations of Christianity include the fiery end of the world, Christ's years in the wilderness, his marriage to his church, and his Crucifixion. But the mockery in all this is that Albee regards Christ crucified, or any martyr...