Word: lessing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...true. The mob more or less kept their distance, individuals approached on eggshells. They sensed that those arms, arms like thighs, had been built by an essentially destructive impulse, that at the slightest provocation Arnold might elicit painful obeisance with those big blue boots. Finally someone summoned the nerve. (To be stomped by Arnold...
Fanny's daughter Julie inherits her mantle in the play, and Katharine Kean in her role offers plentiful urbanity and ease on stage. Her dramatic posturing is less subtle than Wilber's, and more self-conscious, but she maintains the illusion of the unrivalled actress in her prime in all but the most taxing moments. In the grand renunciation scene, when she announces she will leave the stage--forever, of course--the poised aristocrat turns into a ranting hausfrau, flailing and directing her harangue at the audience. The dislocation is brief but unsettling...
...LESS PASSIVE director might have chosen to make more of The Royal Family; in this production, nothing transcends simple comedy except Fanny's Act II monologue--a magical evocation of the scene backstage before curtain time, which Wilber uses to cast a spell over the house. In this case, passivity unintentionally pays off--the Loeb Royal Family doesn't pin any more significance on the slightly dated script than it can support. Three hours of good comedy remain, without any mirror tricks but without too much pretense, as well...
...suffering from a variety of serious disorders, including a seemingly uncheckable algae growth that, like a fast-spreading cancer, was choking off the other forms of life. Though the remaining four of North America's great chain of lakes-Superior, Michigan, Huron and Ontario-were less diseased, they too showed symptoms of serious, man-made illness...
That would benefit the U.S. steel indus try and the economy of several ports. But environmentalists fear that disruption of the lakes' whiter ice cover would cause damage to fish and plant life. The energy crisis has made state governments less resistant to suggestions that gas and oil explorations- with their potential for pollution- be undertaken in the Great Lakes basin. (Canada already takes natural gas from Lake Erie.) These problems are not insoluble, but they will require a subtlety of technology and policy quite different from the massive input of dollars that cured many of the lakes...