Word: lear
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...Today show and heard Moynihan describing it to Barbara Walters as a major American initiative. In a widely publicized outburst last November, Britain's Ambassador Ivor Richard compared Moynihan (without actually naming him) variously to a trigger-happy Wyatt Earp, a vengeful Savonarola and a demented King Lear "raging amidst the storm on the blasted heath." Another Western delegate claims that "never in my U.N. experience have I seen such open criticism of an American ambassador by my colleagues...
...must have seemed a good idea doing a parody soap opera. For the opening minutes of its first episode last week, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman - which Producer Norman Lear is syndicating because, he claims, the networks were afraid of it - still seemed like a good idea. There was the bird-brained heroine in the dreary suburb pouring endless cups of coffee for her girl friends...
...turn out to be the height of hilarity. In fact, they are depressing. Drawing the characters in the series not from the middle-class world where most soap opera people live but from the blue-collar class where most of their viewers reside seems, like so many Norman Lear notions, condescending rather than clever. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is silly stupid, silly stupid...
...attention. Colleges are offering courses on them. They are being claimed as heirs to the 18th century tradition of the picaresque romantic novel. Others think Daniel Defoe started it all with Moll Flanders. This week, the soaps receive what intellectuals might consider the ultimate accolade: a serious parody. Norman Lear's spoof, Mary Hartman! Mary Hartman! will start airing on 90 independent stations?often scheduled opposite the very shows it is spoofing...
When I was rehearsing for King Lear, I went on neighboring land and I screamed King Lear at the cows, who all came up and thought it was marvelous. And I roared at them and they'd moo. But the point was to exercise these bellows. Just to go on and think, "Oh, well, other people have done it, so I can," without preparing your whole physique for it, is a failure to realize that the basic need for being good at anything is to be in a fit condition for it. What you must finally achieve...