Word: laughingly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...play, but he never really resolves it. To Shakespeare's sophistry, Timothy Mayer has added gimmickry and faddistry, carefully avoiding the problem of how to clarify and dramatize the play's hard theological core. Putting the play and the characters in modern dress has its dividends. Angelo gets a laugh when he says "Call him hither" into an intercom, and Lucio gets one when he lights his cigarette with a votive lamp. In short, Mayer has filled his ample trickbag with modern props to use when things get slow, which is very often...
...that "everybody have a hell of a lot of fun." As Laurel liked to tell his disciples: "Don't sit around and tear comedy apart. It is like a fine watch, and you'll never get it together again. And don't ask me why people laugh-that is the mystery...
Restricted & Impoverished. Illustrating the problems created by the church's ban on divorce, he tells of the suffering Catholic whose wife flaunted her infidelity by coming home with other men. "He heard her laugh on the sofa downstairs, heard her moans of pleasure. Finally, he left her. He met another girl who made him know he was a man. He came to his priest and learned that one burst of semen had bound him to a whore...
...playwright to champion his individualists, no matter how loathsome they are, over that bourgoeis juggernaut. But he never does; he never takes sides. He doesn't entirely approve of either the Jacksons or the Sawneys, but he writes a play about them because they are all good for a laugh. John Arden is a playwright who has negative capability in spades...
...behavior is that Arden is not making points, but people. He has nothing to prove and nothing to sell, and therefore he doesn't have to manipulate his characters into demonstrating a proof or making a sale. They are there in the stark altogether in order to make us laugh, and we laugh because they are disgusting and hypocritical, not because they are airing the writer's gags. And when any playwright gives his characters as much free reign as Arden does, he is bound to overwrite, as Arden most certainly does...