Word: leer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...after an off-Broadway play called The Apple, by Jack Gelber, begins, a character picks up a spatula, slings blobs of paint at a transparent plastic canvas, and then kneads the goo together with a rolling pin. Peering around this cunningly messy parody of abstract art with a confiding leer, the actor announces to the playgoers: "I'll admit why I'm here-therapy...
...real beery leer...
...Olympia Press, the world's most notorious publisher of English-language pornography. Girodias, an amiable, vague, unbusinesslike man, plays the role of a monster of depravity with vigor but no consistency, registering at different times belligerence, shy embarrassment, prosperous self-satisfaction, artiness, guilt, and a well-practiced sinister leer. Last week it was artiness; he would like nothing better than to be put out of business, he said-in fact Olympia's sole aim has been to batter down the bastions of censorship and make the world safe for experimental literature. Supporting this seven-eighths hypocrisy, Girodias points...
...finds that the best markets are France and, in descending but inexplicable order, Venezuela, Lebanon, Italy, Greece, Mexico and Scandinavia. Some 25 to 30 new Companions are issued each year, and Girodias figures that at least five people read each copy. "Which makes," he says, flashing the sinister leer, "an average of 600,000 people corrupted every year...
Julie Harris brings an entire patois of peasant gestures to her role, including a session of silently mouthing something like the Marseillaise when the wheels of justice grind too slowly. Even when the script asks to be played by leer, her gamin charm turns it into innocent merriment, as when she mimics her active lover: "He'd just tear and rip every which way, and I hate sewing." But there are always traces of the Harris poignance, a little girl lost and a trifle afraid, waking up in beds she never made...