Word: matriarchs
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...mill town. As the mills move south and the aristocratic tradition built on them crumbles, a generation in transition is coarsened and corrupted. The writing is mainly descriptive, switching skillfully between the points of view of nine-year-old Michael and of his aunt Mandy, who acts as a matriarch and alone recalls the aristocratic values of the past. Although the piece is avowedly part of a longer work, the scene through Michael's ingenuous eyes has a unity of mood and detail...
Characters wander in & out of The Enclosure as if it were a transient hotel. Its reigning matriarch, Mrs. Halstead, dies, and with her goes the grand style of life. She had been, as one of the Enclosure stalwarts put it, "the only one around here worth the powder to blow her to hell." Those who survive are a sad lot: her son Christopher, a bilious minister devoted to the comforts of the flesh; her grandson Christopher Jr., a well-read neurotic who fritters himself away in hypochondria; her neighbor Moylan Stacy, an undertaker new to the Enclosure and representing...
...Long Days (by Davis Snow; produced by Tait-Buell) is one more of those gnarled, harsh dramas laid in a New England farmhouse. It concerns nine characters named Adams, who are not uncharacteristically lined up eight against one. The one is the matriarch of the family (Frances Starr), a fiercely dominating woman who puts the farm above its inhabitants, her ancestors ahead of her descendants. A hurried and lurid ending shows that she was not only intensely possessive but .pathologically possessed. Playwright Snow writes with great seriousness, but little power or skill. The Long Days has all the greyness...
...world-in-little of a Grand Hotel. There is not enough significant interplay; characters constantly mingle but seldom merge. There is rather the sort of populous, externally shared living that is the basis of social comedy. And the play offers effective social comedy through such types as a tart matriarch or a hen-brained gadder, or through the assorted disturbances caused by the returning beau...
From the No. 1 Communist of the U.S., William Z. Foster, and some associates came a birthday posy for old Party Matriarch Mother (Ella Reeve) Bloor. "Your 88th birthday," they reminded her, "sees 850 million in the world who have moved away from the bloody way of imperialism...