Word: maiden
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...blasted hopes of Kim, a country maiden turned bar girl turned bride-to- be turned stateless refugee, are a paradigm for all the promises that Western powers made but failed to keep in Vietnam and other colonies. Her yearning is echoed comically and tragically in her sometime pimp, a Eurasian hustler called the Engineer, whose vision of the U.S. is a pathetic pop mishmash of the Statue of Liberty, big white Cadillacs and Fred Astaire, but whose one certainty is that he was born to live the American Dream -- a hope he will never fulfill. The propulsive narrative works...
...race riot. The evil nurse in Misery doesn't chop her captive's foot off with an ax; she breaks it with a mallet. The heroine in Sleeping with the Enemy doesn't bravely confront her husband on her own terms; she cringes like a silent-film maiden tied to the railroad tracks. Plus ca change. Movies, even if they have literary beginnings, still need Hollywood endings...
Beauty is a conspiracy of pain forced upon women. Anorexia, induced by the pursuit of attractiveness, turns girls into something resembling skeletons. In the boardroom and in the bedroom, women are entrapped by a cult that is the equivalent of the iron maiden, a medieval torture instrument that impaled its captives on iron spikes...
...production benefits from fluid, cinematic staging by the company's artistic director, Sharon Ott, and a highly adaptable village-square setting by Kate Edmunds. The production is so good that even a predictable climax -- the villain's armed intrusion at the wedding of a shepherd he despises and a maiden he means to rape -- achieves the abrupt power of surprise. Among a solid ensemble cast, Jack Heller is a wonderfully hissable overlord, full of chill arrogance and hot rage, and Domenique Lozano and Stephen Burks are the most affecting of his victims. The chief asset, however, is the play itself...
...Coles, for example, have acquired skills they never imagined they'd need, like dodging creditors. Sometimes they put the electric bill in Jennifer's maiden name and the phone bill in Jeff's name, then move to another town and do the reverse. "We owe everybody money," says Jennifer. "It becomes, 'Do we want to pay back $400 we owe his parents -- they're not exactly wealthy people -- or do we pay the people who are chasing us the hardest...