Word: masks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...here. Ten years or so ago, Bette and I cast our faces in plaster; I had to go first. The casting went as smooth as silk. I even posed on the kitchen floor with a lily in my hand and my face in the firm grip of a plaster mask. I didn't realize how firm a grip it was until I attempted to remove it. (We had used petroleum jelly without the benefit of Saran.) I was hung up by my hair and my eyelashes. My eyebrows pulled out without any fuss, but I couldn't bear...
Brown Paper Masks. Steinberg drawings are meant to be read, and over the years they have developed into an increasingly sophisticated sign language. The vignettes can be metaphysical or as simple as a curious cat peering into a number 4. Fond of visual puns, he pokes fun at the art of drawing; the artist often grows out of his own pen, winds up as a square, or worse, becomes thoroughly entangled in his own shenanigans. His masks painted on brown wrapping paper are cutting satires. "They are not caricatures," Steinberg insists. "They are the faces, the masks of the middle...
Steinberg's wry humor may also be a mask. In the past ten years his drawings have taken a cerebral and sometimes sobering turn. Doubt and anguish are registered by a tiny figure poised atop an enormous question mark, which is itself hovering on the edge of an abyss. Brave but hapless little Indians combat a great American sphinx...
...pain, must be played out as vividly as their individual torments. O'Neill has provided the lines for this, Ginn hasn't given the direction. Long Day's Journey abounds with sentences interrupted or regretted by their speaker, moments of nakedness in which Jamie's concern breaks through his mask of cynicism, or Edmund's raw anger smashes his attempts at peacemaking...
Herbert Adams as Jamie also has a monotony of tone. Ironically enough, his character--which should have the coldest mask--is played with the most warmth and sympathy. However, he gets too involved, too early. Never having worn his cynicism with detachment, his last-act confession of feeling has to border on the maudlin to have any effect. But his drunken recounting of the night at the whorehouse, along with Sheila Hart's portrayal of the servant girl, are the only moments of humor in the play which came across successfully. Nagin and Seltzer seem to feel reticent and slightly...