Word: kalem
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...classics accessible. Actually, such shows are merely masked in the accessories of modernity - rock music, randy deshabille, silly props and lofty panfraternal sentimentality. The resulting trivia are perfectly suited to an audience that in Eliot's phrase wishes to be "distracted from distraction by distraction." · T.E. Kalem...
...feel that the critic is a kind of spoilsport. But anyone who writes a play is joining the company of some real giants. I'm not here to say to a playwright, 'How nice, John, you've written a play.' Let his mother say that." Kalem believes that he is here "to give the reader a clear idea of whether this work is worth seeing. Criticism should also aim at placing a play within the history of its genre...
Though he often differs sharply with his colleagues, Kalem gets good notices from them. Says Clive Barnes of the New York Times: "What makes Ted one of the finest critics America has ever produced is his very emotive relationship with the theater, a relationship that far transcends mere intellectual considerations." Twice elected to be president of the New York Drama Critics Circle, Kalem nonetheless chose to abstain on two occasions from the circle's balloting for best play of the year. "Some people," he explains, "regard the theater season as a horse show, and if the closest thing they...
...Kalem's search for thoroughbreds started while he was growing up in Maiden, Mass. His Greek parents, Protestant fundamentalists from Asia Minor, called the stage "an instrument of the devil." This attitude naturally created a forbidden-fruit temptation, and young Ted sneaked bites at every opportunity. But it was to be a long road to his permanent aisle seat. At Harvard he majored in sociology, graduating cum laude. During World War II he won a Bronze Star in the Pacific. At the Christian Science Monitor he reviewed books, an occupation he followed during his first ten years at TIME...
...height of the 1971 Broadway season, Kalem's satisfaction over his successful trek is a bit diluted by some of the shows he sees. Still, he cannot abandon the belief that theater "is the noblest of arts, a metaphysical ritual, an unbound volume of erotica, a childlike festival of clowns and kings, a never-surfeiting banquet for the eye, the ear and at times the soul...