Word: laura
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...Grumbach seems at all inadequate, it is because his costars are so nearly perfect. Laura Bartell's Anna is a superbly controlled performance. Her monologues ring with the passion of nostalgia; her eyes, gazing longingly at Kate, and her face, later crumpled with pain, convey decades of meaning...
This shallow breathing occurs during a doleful evening in which Clara and three other skinless neurotics are bullied in a desultory way by a thick-skinned fifth person, Clara's frightful mother Laura. The other characters are Clara's drunken stepfather; her uncle, an exhausted, ironical pederast; and a middleaged, neuter male publisher who is a family friend. There is too much drinking, too much smoking, too much acute description of mental states. The author, unwilling to waste a scrap of anguish, views the browned-out scene through the eyes of each gloomy participant in turn. Boredom, peevishness...
...truth, of course, is that no parody is intended in The Widow's Children. The author sets her dismal characters in their tedious situation quite seriously, as if advancing the theory that any well-described vacuum constitutes a novel. The central non-event of the evening is that Laura's own mother Alma has died a few hours ago, but only Laura knows this. She refuses to tell anyone, presumably because the evening will seem even more pointless and ghastly when the truth finally is learned. "One has to take your mother seriously, but not in the usual...
Harvard doesn't begin in September, it began in April. Laura Prarer...
...Laura Elizabeth Smith Birmingham