Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...friend Heidi, a practicing Lutheran, glared at them. I stared in utter disbelief--incredulous that such people existed--and tried hard to stifle my laughter. My friend Christy sat meekly, not speaking. The couple, sensing prey, focused their efforts...
...Once the laughter subsides, however, there is nothing to take its place except an occasional chant of "sieve, sieve" and scattered applause better suited to an amateur golf tournament...
...happy man's abrupt tumble into lunacy is recounted first person in the chill of retrospect, after an equally arbitrary, untrustworthy recovery. The other play, Alan Ayckbourn's more complex Woman in Mind, gives audiences no such easy signposts and thus achieves an even richer mixture of laughter and pain. It opened last week at off-Broadway's Manhattan Theater Club in a staging by the M.T.C.'s longtime artistic director, Lynne Meadow, that excels the London original mounted by Ayckbourn himself...
...prolific (Ayckbourn, 48, has written more than 30 plays), popular with mainstream audiences, observant of middle-class absurdities and almost compulsively funny, no matter how dark the underlying theme. The key difference: Simon has a forgiving, generous spirit toward his characters, while Ayckbourn is increasingly merciless. Audiences pause amid laughter and abruptly realize that the landscape is blasted. Ayckbourn borrowed this technique, if not much else, from Chekhov, and at his best -- as in Season's Greetings, Time and Time Again and Woman in Mind -- uses it just as effectively...
Leele Groome once stood up in front of a bus and did a 10-minute Harvard field hockey rap. For 10 minutes, the bus was filled with laughter...