Word: lanford
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...TALE TOLD by Lanford Wilson...
Many writers have focused on a place, a time or a family. But few have been so specific-or so obsessed-as Lanford Wilson is in his saga of the Talley family of Lebanon, Mo. Talley's Folly took place on July 4, 1944, and Fifth of July opened on the same night, 33 years later. Now the third of the series, which began a three-week run off-Broadway last week, returns to Independence Day 1944, with the action of A Tale Told supposedly unfolding at the same time as that of Talley's Folly. While Matt...
Indeed, the only thing that is obvious in this well-directed, well-acted play is that Lanford Wilson is a very talented writer. His dialogue is sharp, and his characters have color and life: he just does not know what he wants them to do and where he wants them to go. The Talleys continue to fascinate, however. Perhaps they will return to celebrate another Fourth of July. -By Gerald Clarke
...BEGINNING of Talley's Folly, it looks like Lanford Wilson has set out to illustrate a most commonplace idea: that opposites attract. The two characters that comprise his cast start at the antipodes of American society. Matt Friedman is a Lithuanian Jewish accountant, gray suit, beard and wire glasses, Mittel-European accent and Henny Youngman-style jokes. Sally Talley springs from a factory-owning Ozark tamily, works as a nurse in an army hospital (it's 1944) and has a jaw locked as tight as a cashbox. The two are not a very probable couple...
...CLEAR exactly what Lanford Wilson was trying to do with The Rimers of Eldritch. Rimers came out of the late 1960's a curious kind of half-breed. It broke from the traditional comedy or love-story categories into which most of Wilson's later work falls fairly neatly. It's not a murder mystery or a western, as the sensational excerpt on the publicity posters around campus might suggest. Instead, it's an early and uncertain try at experimental theater, one that ends up as a modern mood piece, a stained glass of many parts through which a light...