Word: melodrama
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...four days of sometimes anguished public testimony before the House and Senate Select Committees investigating Iranscam. McFarlane, who served as Reagan's National Security Adviser from October 1983 to December 1985, is perhaps the most poignant figure in the scandal. Last February, depressed about his role in the political melodrama, he attempted suicide by swallowing an overdose of Valium...
...staging is spartan, with all the action taking place around a group of chairs and a single table, which serve as a shelter where battered women discuss--sometimes with more than a touch of melodrama--marital disputes. The disputes are reinacted with only minor scene changes...
...Black patriarch reiterates white segregationist arguments and then, moments later, discovers that daughter Bridget has been having an affair with Billy Brown, the white housemaid's boy. He flies off in a rage, swearing revenge upon the poor kid. These actors do their best with this warp-speed melodrama and even manage a few comic moments, but Lee's material doesn't allow any great depth of characterization...
...respite will be brief. On May 5, Congress is scheduled to begin its public hearings on the Iran-contra affair. While the scandal has been off the front pages recently, congressional investigators and Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh have slowly and meticulously been building a powerful case against the melodrama's key players. Sources close to the probe told TIME last week that there is now "enough evidence to indict people...
...Broadway audiences were chilled by The Bad Seed. The title character of that melodrama was a homicidal moppet whose appearance was so angelic that no one but her mother suspected the hidden crimes. British Novelist B.M. Gill has given the premise a sardonic twist: in Nursery Crimes, wicked little Zanny repeatedly confesses to several murders but is so widely disbelieved that she concludes her sins are minor, subject to a penance of three Hail Marys. At home, at school, in church and even among the police, grownups fail her. The story's most compelling relationship unfolds between Zanny...