Word: mask
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...baby, as an alien object enkindling fear, as the skirt in which she danced with measured delicacy or frenzied abandon, and finally as a pair of wings launching her into solipsistic flight. Through an accumulation of flawlessly-timed, needle-sharp details, Casson awakened issues of astonishing complexity: identity and mask, fantasy and madness, reality and imagination, or--as when she held the bunched skirt to her breast, moving her own mouth in the fishlike gulps of a nursing baby--the poignant tension between who we are and what we create. Yet dance, as distinct from brilliant mime, remained subsidiary...
Steinberg's work is always signaling that there are more interesting matters in art than "authenticity" in the expressionist sense. It looks beyond the man to the mask and finds there an extraordinary variety of personae, by turns bland, urbane, comic, ridiculous and distinctly threatening. The first mask of all is style itself. "I want the minimum of performance in my work," says Steinberg, a virtuoso if ever there was one. "Performance bores me. What interests me is the invention. I like to make a parody of bravura. You have to think of a lot of my work as some...
...time, when it still has the air of fiction. It lasts one day." The late '40s and '50s were perhaps the last time in Europe when travel was travel, unfiltered and not homogenized by mass tourism. It must have appealed to Steinberg as a form of controlled exile?the mask of expatriation...
...PLAY, Tribute, Bernard Slade slowly peels the mask off the chronic cut-up, the "life of the party:" the guy who clowns with everyone, loves everyone, is loved by everyone and opens up to no one--not even himself. The play is an excellent piece of entertainment wrapped in an extraordinary production, and if Slade doesn't dig deep enough--opting to warm the heart rather than chill the soul--the play suggests that a more self-conscious and hence more penetrating approach to humor, wherein characters ponder the neurotic implications of their own one-liners, has merged into popular...
...American sit-com writer has turned out awfully shallow. This bathos gives Jack Lemmon his star turn: fast-food epiphany, downstage center. Neither he nor Slade really needed this--although it must be fun to break down onstage. Tribute slobbers when it ought only to quiver; the mask comes off and the jelly underneath dribbles all over the stage...