Word: mcgovernment
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...children's crusade harks back--about 40 years back. In 1969, a few years before young voters embraced his presidential campaign, George McGovern spearheaded a rule that women, minorities and young people should be seated at the convention in proportion to their share of the population. It sounded great at the time, but for the next several decades, young voters didn't turn out in any numbers that their population share might have suggested. (McGovern got creamed.) That could change this year. Obama has energized millions of voters age 36 and under, who seem to be organizing entire states...
...Yorkers with what may have been their greatest theatrical experience of the decade. This time the Gate's artistic director, Michael Colgan, presented three pieces from Beckett's writing for other media: TV, for Eh Joe (Neeson), the short story, for "First Love" (Fiennes) and the novel: Barry McGovern's tour-de-force I'll Go On, a distilling of the Beckett novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable...
...Laughing wild certainly abounded in the hour-long Saturday matinee of readings from Beckett texts by Fiennes, Neeson, McGovern and Julianne Moore. Among the readings was a passage from the short story "The Expelled," published, like "First Love," in 1946. Its protagonist is a dour brute not far from the nameless necrophile in "First Love," and Fiennes again took the role. He describes walking down a city street when "I had to fling myself to the ground to avoid crushing a child. He was wearing a little harness, I remember, with little bells, he must have taken himself...
...guilt of Irish laughter resounds through much of I'll Go On, McGovern's and Gerry Dukes' selection of passages from the three novels. McGovern, one of the foremost players of Beckett, mines every vein of showmanship in the works. Riding a bicycle while holding crutches, or squatting nearly naked and spitting out whole paragraphs in a long breath, he's a veritable Cirque de Solo. Even on his deathbed (in the Malone Dies section), the McGovern-Beckett character finds much to laugh about, though his smile is a rictus...
...What won Beckett his Nobel Prize - the grim death gargling at you from every page - may also keep audiences away; they think he's a sanctified chore, homework for Mensa members. But as McGovern, Fiennes and Neeson demonstrated, with their considerable artistry, Beckett was a mesmerizer, a spellbinder, who held a cracked mirror to humanity and saw the humanity in it. We're pitiable creatures, no doubt, and birth is just the first step toward death, but funny in our cruelties and yearnings. At least that's what this Beckett fan thought at the end of the Gate marathon, Laugh...