Word: maria
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Raymond Chandler knew the territory well, Nathanael West wrote of it brilliantly in The Day of the Locust, but no one has recently taken the measure of the neon void with such savage precision as Joan Didion. Play It As It Lays was a novel about a young actress, Maria Wyeth, crumbling into the pieces of a psychic jigsaw. Didion drew the Southern California landscape with poisonous accuracy, using its shifting scenes to delineate states of an increasingly troubled mind...
...Maria (Tuesday Weld) passes her days wandering about the grounds of a psychiatric hospital where she is a patient. "Nothing applies" she scrawls across the battery of psychological tests they give her. Her husband Carter (Adam Roarke) is a pompous young hack who makes motorcycle movies and discusses the auteur theory. His producer B.Z. (Anthony Perkins) tries both to meddle with and mend their broken marriage. Maria has already had one child-Kate, herself disturbed-and aborted a second. In her sickness and despair, she clings to Carter, who humiliates her with the kind of bitter brutality she usually heaps...
There is not a great deal that Tuesday Weld can do with any of this. She is an actress of a curious and unique talent, especially adept at expressing elfin, vaguely threatening sexuality. Maria, obsessive and tormented, eludes her. Less introverted than preoccupied, Tuesday seems as lost as Maria herself, although the only good moment in the film is hers. "See the pyramids all wet with rain / Cross the ocean in a silver plane" Maria croons, stoned crazy in an old 16-mm. verité documentary of Carter's, and in those few seconds Weld touches some of Maria...
...OTHER FIGURE shows a similar development, and character transformation under the impact of events is not really the major concern of the play. Rather archetypes respond to crisis in a straightforward fashion. Caroline Downey, as the mayor's wife, Anna Andreevna, and Lee Cork as his daughter, Maria Antonovna, act in conventional, highly stylized and artificial unison, play off of each other very nicely, and are a high point in the evening. Yet, they are static, and in the end differ in no particular way from their status at the beginning. Similarly, the mayor, portrayed by Wayne Mitchell, remains unchanged...
Born. To The Netherlands Princess Irene, 33, and Prince Carlos Hugo de Bourbon-Parma, 42: twins, a boy and girl, their second son and first daughter; in Nijmegen, The Netherlands Names: Jaime Bernardo and Marguarita Maria Beatrice...