Word: masks
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Congealed Grin. Subtle characterization has never been the Duke's long suit. Instead, he and Hathaway create an antique through a series of gestures and symbols-a grin that congeals into a mask of hate, a plodding gait that belies the deadly hands, a primitive mind that can only understand an idea or a society by turning it over and looking at the underside. In the end they come up with a flawless portrait of a flawed man who is as simple, as forceful-and as dangerous-as Mattie's cap-and-ball Colt pistol...
...most exciting images when they deal with the human figure, a disturbing subject that has never been completely eliminated by abstract art. Even fragmented, dissolved, the figure maintains its appeal. The most striking sculpture is composed of sixteen editions of the same white face, like a plaster death mask, wedged into square compartments of a metal grid, like eggs in a box. Gliding in a sequence like words in a paragraph, the heads are tilted at slightly different angles. shifting with every position, the shadows redefine the expression on each colorless face. The head, locked in but just able...
...Kahn's most memorable scene is still to come, when Henry is handed the list of "the names of those their nobles that lie dead." As he recites the long roster, name by name, a score of men gradually come on stage each wearing a ghostly white mask splotched with fresh blood. Finally the King intones the incipit of a Te Deum, and the ghostly choir picks it up in unison and, in the manner of the Living Theatre, moves down-stage to face the audience in a long row, humming and swaying from left to right--an inspired fusion...
Some of her victims wish they had a column in which to call her something like Miss VV (Vile and Vicious) or BB (Biting and Bitchy). Sweet Julie Andrews drops her Mary Poppins mask and says of Haber: "She needs open-heart surgery-and they should go in through her feet." Director Blake Edwards charges that "Haber's writing is so blatantly vicious and her motivation so disturbed that she really adds up to a psychiatric case...
...tale of a man's adjustment to life in an escapeless pit-and gave it both mythic reality and a moral power. Abé's The Face of Another, a novel about a chemist with a burnt-out face who attempts to function behind a life mask he has fashioned for himself, is as direct as any contemporary exploration of the identity-crisis theme. The Ruined Map, his newest novel to be translated into English, involves the Japanese version of a traditional Western private eye, but the view is strictly from an Eastern slant. The suspense is stirred...