Word: lear
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...such is Cold Turkey, an extended sitcom loaded with the kind of jokes that induce canned laughter. Like the Mock Turtle, Writer-Director Norman Lear attempts an arithmetic composed of Ambition, Distraction, Uglification and Derision. A tobacco tycoon (the late Edward Everett Horton) offers $25 million to any American city whose inhabitants can quit smoking for 30 days, on the plausible theory that it cannot be done. But he reckons without the Rev. Clayton Brooks (Dick Van Dyke). Led by the uptight, upright preacher, Eagle Rock, Iowa, turns abolitionist. In the process, it writhes with collective withdrawal symptoms familiar...
Othello needs to be retrieved even more than it needs to be revived. Of Shakespeare's four great tragedies, which include Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth, Othello has become increasingly less accessible to modern audiences and actors. There are several reasons for this. To the contemporary playgoer, the Moor's marital jealousy is more amazing than it is convincing, and the evidence of the telltale handkerchief seems unbelievably flimsy. Today's audiences are also more interested in lago's psychologically obscure malignity than in Othello's open nature and loftiness of soul...
...possibility nonetheless tantalizes: Who would decide what qualities to preserve, and by what standards? Even remedial genetic engineering could pose a distressing problem if it achieved the ability to remove "undesirable" behavior tendencies. Asks Thielicke: "Would one try to eradicate Faust's restlessness, Hamlet's indecision, King Lear's conscience, Romeo and Juliet's conflicts...
...show's director, Peter Brook, is a man of many devices. His chief device is to defeat the traditional expectations of the audience. His credo might be "Accentuate the opposite." This credo links Marat/ Sade with King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Do we expect actors to move naturally on stage and to speak intelligible words? In Marat/ Sade, Brook made his actors move as if walking were a stylized, agonized abstraction of motion. The actors moaned, groaned, hissed and made surrealistic animal noises. Do we think of Lear as an arrogant red-hotheaded old king...
...children's enjoyment." Adds Kanfer: "Deep down we're all culturally disadvantaged. Because there's not enough irony, humor and liberated nonsense for all us kids. There's a profound wit that we've all lost track of since Edward Lear and the Alice books...