Word: manically
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...audiences as dizzyingly as ever. So do the wrenching emotional scenes of a boldly tragicomic plot. At the center is a lovers' triangle: a zookeeper and would-be songwriter, played with ingratiating and ultimately terrifying optimism by John Mahoney; his mistress, pneumatically impersonated by Stockard Channing; and his eerily manic-depressive wife, evoked with simultaneous goofiness and dignity by Swoosie Kurtz in what may be the best performance of the season. Kurtz barks and mewls like a dog, she wanders vacant-eyed like Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night, she throws things and lapses into catatonia...
Reddin is bringing off a rare double: while his words resound in Rum and Coke, he is onstage 20 blocks away in a manic revival of the 1930s farce Room Service, a portrait of pre-Broadway opening desperation. Reddin winningly playswhat else?--the playwright, a geeky kid from Oswego who eventually has to "die" for an hour and a half so that his show might live. Director Alan Arkin seems too conscious that Room Service was adapted as a Marx Brothers movie vehicle. Mark Hamill, the fresh-faced Luke Skywalker of the Star Wars series, is mustached and growly...
...Faces are constantly aflush with anger, ardor, embarrassment. Anguish over dates and grades streaks the first application of mascara. Clique rivalries make the Iran-Iraq war seem congenial by comparison. Emotions newly discovered are unique and convulsive. She loves me! Life hates me! How anyone endures this seven-year manic-depressive itch is a mystery even to those who have survived...
During its first half, the movie revolves around Eliot and Lee's affair and Holly's manic moods. Mickey begins a desperate search for "the meaning of it all," after a false alarm that he has cancer gives him an intimation of mortality. It is a world of petty vices like alcohol and cocaine. In the hierarchy of values, sexual pleasure ranks above marital fidelity and sibling loyalty...
...shift of taste that took New York art into the '80s. In a catalog essay to this show, Art Critic Roberta Smith puts her finger on the peculiar character of Bartlett's work: "a series of reflections--of the world, of other people's art . . . a sense of manic cerebralism and arbitrariness, a distance, even an indifference . . . riddled with sophisticated obviousness." The work is set up like an automatic mechanism, but hand-painted in a capricious parody of pictorial richness. A load of modernist signs for sensual delight--thick, ropy color that invokes the transparency of water, spots and scribbles...