Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...spirit set in the earlier scenes. Director McCreery, who expressed some concern that audiences might see the play merely as an exercise in ridiculousness, need not worry. Artaud wrote occasionally about the similarity between all strong emotional reactions, and he would certainly understand the thin line between dark laughter and somber rapture. The Mather House production spans the line with ease. At the very least, The Cenci is not pompous or boring, and as we approach Reading Period, what other company of speakers can talk to you for an hour and make that claim...
...Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in the U.S. in 1980, Author Milan Kundera brilliantly fused passion and playfulness. That book's collection of seven loosely related stories danced around a central, somber event: the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The resulting oppression halted the liberal reforms that blossomed during the famous Prague Spring of 1968 and eventually drove a number of intellectuals and artists, including Kundera, from their native country. Songs of exile are sad, by definition. Yet Kundera's added a comic vision capable of seeing both oppressors and oppressed locked in battle against a common enemy...
...tale of that struggle is continued in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which seems at first simply a replication of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Again, the Soviet crackdown becomes a watershed in the experience of Kundera's people, making the past irretrievable and the future ominous. Again, the author divides his fiction into seven parts. This time, though, the connections between them are firmer. Four main characters keep reappearing, and their lives, though not always displayed chronologically, assume the extended contours of traditional love stories...
...director, Veber elicits endearingly screwball performances from his leads: Depardieu, who looks like the last side of beef they hauled out of Les Halles, and Richard, his cartoon face ever ready to burst into laughter or tears...
...tone for the Midwest stop was set en route from the West Coast. As champagne was being poured in the galley, the French contingent's well-meaning but far-from-fluent American stewardess announced that "champignon " would soon be served. Her passengers whooped with ungallant laughter. In Gaylesburg, Ill., to tour Secretary of Agriculture John Block's 3,000-acre farm, Mitterrand donned rubber boots, a farmer's cap and a sky-blue jacket with MR. PRESIDENT stitched over the heart. He and Block disagreed about American exports undercutting European Community farmers, but Mitterrand lightened the mood...