Word: linen
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...last, the bottle was unsealed. Barbara Dunbar, director of the historical society, and Archivist Greg Koos used forceps to draw out the little mummies, wrapped in white linen and tied round and round with thread. General McNulta's sense of history turned out to be touchingly immediate. He had left, so elaborately wrapped and labeled...
...STOPPARD's DIRTY LINEN took its time getting to Boston from its London debut four years age, and it really wasn't worth the wait. A play about loose morals in high places may have been timely back then, but today Stoppard's collection of panty humor just seems a trifle, something the author tossed off between cigarettes. The play is already showing its age, and it has not weathered the trans-Atlantic voyage that well...
Though Dirty Linen finds Stoppard in poor form as a thinker, it has its funny moments--when he resists the temptation to use simple bawdy humor and recovers his quirky intellectual muse. In the original London production of the show, the company had a sense of proportion, and carefully understated the strangeness of Stoppard's dialogue to make it sound more believable. Thus the show's introductory sequence--in which two MPs arrive in the committee room and converse for several minutes using only foreign cliches--succeeded through the lack of self-consciousness on the stage...
...Found-Land, Stoppard's play-within-a-play, both the author and the performers are in better form. New-Found-Land is in some ways even more of a trifle than Dirty Linen--it's essentially two monologues, one delivered by a senile minister about his youthful meeting with Lloyd George, the other by a young civil servant about his dreams of America. John Straub as Bernard, the codger, steals the show with simple, somnolent nods of his head--a note of comic understatement other members of BARC could learn from...
BETWEEN DIRTY LINEN and New-Found-Land, Stoppard has managed to fill out an evening of theater, even to make it entertaining. But there's so much more to expect from the author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It's a bit sad to see a man who challenged Shakespeare to verbal duels wasting his time pulling blue panties out of his characters' pockets...