Word: litted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ROOM, hot-shot novelist Don DeLillo turns insanity into a laughing matter. "Nothing original in that," you say, "it's been done hundreds of times since Hamlet." But DeLillo, the paragon of paranoid lit, has packed his literary loonybin with so much intelligence and dramatic punch that madness starts to look like an appealing state of affairs...
...while Beantown has sent many a talented stand-up cut-up out into the brightly lit, dimly conceived world of big-time comedy, it hasn't gotten much back in return. Top headliners don't come to town too often and homegrown prodigies such as Leno and Wright only pop in for occasional, surprise appearances at their old haunts. As a result, Boston comedy has been suffering from the excruciating boredom that inevitably results when the same young comics--those who can't break into the big time--perform at the same old clubs weekend after weekend...
Kopit's play is almost a paradigm of the burgeoning genre of "Nuclear Lit." The brain-deadening pattern lack much variation, having been set in stone in Strangelove: introduce an outsider to what one journalist termed "the subterranean world of the bomb," then lead him or her step by step through the strategy and institutions of strategic nuclear...
Many who have seen this play and similar pieces from the Nuclear Lit genre try to give them points for having a heart in the right place. But as they say on Broadway, the road to hell--and an early closing--is paved with good intentions. Public spiritedness is no excuse for bad drama, particularly at $15.00 a throw. What's worse, a constant barrage of unimaginitive agitprop will eventually run afoul of the law of diminishing returns. Americans are already information saturated, and witless repititions of the same pointless message about nuclear war will induce indifference, not involvement...
...Kopit and his fellow practitioners of Nuclear Lit better cop this lesson from Hollywood, and either put up good stuff or shut up. Rehashing Kubrick may work for a while--the short memory of the American public and all that--but the thinking, influential audiences, Kopit et. al. are seeking will be the least likely to swallow completely derivative swill...