Word: laughs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...even this lust cannot explain the extent to which he has decayed since Henry IV. Three times he is totally humiliated. It was easy to laugh each time but successively less so, and if it were not for the utter charm which permeated the last scene it would have been difficult to accept it at all. This scene, though perhaps a bit of an addendum, was like Midsummer Night's Dream all over again...
...really come only to test myself. And in the meantime to pretend merely to play a role, to be a would-be streetfighter, to laugh at my own needs, to search out ironies and inconsistencies, to hunt down all that was absurd...
Indeed, I suspect particularly uptight whites in the audience will search for a black in the theater- and wait for him to laugh before they do the same. This is because many whites simply don't know how to react to blacks as people yet. When most liberals hear the black-cum-white characters in Horovitz's play putting on Butterfly McQueen accents, a sign lights up in their minds saying "Racial Stereo-types. . . Gone With the Wind. . . Racist" -and the liberals freeze...
...Andy inflection to a John Lindsay or Wilson Pickett or Rap Brown inflection, the white audience is scared out of its wits. It doesn't know how to react. (The suburban liberal in the second row tells himself each time a character says "Shee-it" : "I can't laugh at that- it may be funny, but everyone will think I'm a racist...
...reactions to dialect that they will fail to deal with these people on the basis of anything but those superficial bases for which they have Pavlovian responses. The audience will be too screwed up-and frightened-by the play's complex inverted humor to listen to the words- or laugh...