Word: lear
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Chuckles Curtailed. "It's like a knee in the groin of social criticism," says Norman Lear, who only 5½ years ago launched TV's new wave of frankness with All in the Family. Since then, sitcoms have laughed at almost everything: there was Maude's abortion, Archie's bigotry, and Rhoda and the Pill. The family laughed with them. Now it will find its chuckles curtailed. All in the Family, TV's No. 1 show last season in its 8 p.m. slot on Saturdays, has been moved to Monday at 9 p.m. Lear...
...Norman Lear suggests that "sex and violence are a smokescreen. There are interests in this country that don't care to have fun made about the problems existing in society." He has another problem too. He stood to make a bundle when All in the Family finally went off network TV and was sold for syndication to local stations. Now he may make a good deal less. The prime hour for syndicated shows is 7 p.m. to 8 p.m., when networks and their affiliates air news and local programs. That is the only time when independents feel they...
...some circles people take a condescending view of the work, meeting at its heavy doses of nostalgia, sentimentality, and homespun platitudes. But if the realm of art is wide enough to contain such bleak and pessimistic views of man and the world as Shakespeare's King Lear, Sartre's No Exit, and Beckett's Endgame, then it is wide enough to contain Wilder's warm, gentle, compassionate and hopeful approach. Wilder early reacted against the tradition of naturalism, with its emphasis on the seamy and sordid side of life, and has by nature tended to look through rose-colored glasses...
...King Lear. This awesome drama sometimes seems to combine the four elements of the ancient world-earth, air, fire and water. The elements are not in their benign aspect, however, but viciously, terrifyingly distempered: earth as earthquake, air as hurricane, fire as holocaust and water as raging flood. What this production gives us is fallow earth, becalmed air, sputtering fire and stagnant water...
Though the cast is far from blameless, the graver error lies with Director Anthony Page. When Lear goes mad on the storm-blistered heath, it is not because his daughters Goneril and Regan have turned their backs on him but because God has. Shakespeare means us to know that the universe itself has reached its apocalyptic hour, and he asks his white-locked King to look upon the dethronement of all order, a grotesque, absurd, horrifying realm of meaninglessness. Instead, Page has encouraged Morris Carnovsky to stress the "foolish fond old man" in Lear, petulant, bewildered and sorely vexed...