Word: laughs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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About all you get from the likes of Private School Girls is a laugh (albeit a hard one). The dialogue is atrocious. Between exclamations of ecstasy, almost every audible line is little more than a sick, flaccid joke. Two examples from Private School Girls will show you what I mean...
...Haldeman & Co. represent the true Middle America, the people Haldeman says read the Reader's Digest? That obviously is ridiculous. In the Detroit Athletic Club, they laugh more. In the suburbs of St. Louis, they understand the Constitution of the U.S. better. In San Francisco, they listen to opposing views more often. English Writer Michael Davie says that the White House wrecking crew forms a new genre of political men, something he labels "Orange County boys," a group molded by the spirit of that Southern California area where, he suggests, fear, suspicion and ignorance come together in unfortunate combinations...
...town critics, like their predecessors a generation ago, were shocked that a woman could say such spiteful things about other women. "They just do not like to think that there could ever have existed this particular streak in women," she says with a laugh. "It is most chivalrous of them. But what annoys me just a little is that reviewers even now, after all the years I have fought and pleaded and written about the cause of women, persist in picturing me as an enemy of my own sex. Every time a woman opens her mouth about another woman...
With all the intensity, there is something more. Baseball's deepest fascination lies in twin aspects of the game: records and time. In other sports, the past is a laugh. Teen-age girls are breaking Johnny Weismuller's old Olympic marks. The four-minute mile has been shattered beyond repair. Pole vaulters, broad jumpers, skiers, quarterbacks, golfers, chess players-they have all rewritten the record books until yesterday's hero is exposed as a man with feat of clay. Only baseball has retained so many of its idols. No one has come close to Joe DiMaggio...
...they intended Superman to be inept and endearing, so they wrote it in. What this Quincy House production does, no less endearingly, is extend the clumsiness to the whole presentation. Needless as this amateur touch is, it doesn't really detract from an evening that had little more than laugh potential anyway. Harvard audiences seem sympathetic to plays that have some rollicking enthusiasm, and no one minded much that the technical, orchestral, and choreographic aspects of this production were bad, bad, bad on opening night...