Word: melodrama
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There was something about Eugene O'Neill's dour eminence as the trailblazer of serious American drama that made his critics and colleagues want to crack wise. While he toiled to bring Euripidean depth and grandeur to domestic melodrama, the nimble midgets in attendance played at defacing his stature. Strange Interlude ran for 4 1/2 hours and an impressive 426 performances; road companies packed the provinces for three seasons after its 1928 opening; the play brought O'Neill his third Pulitzer Prize, and sped him on to a Nobel in 1936. And still the jesters japed. Critic Alexander Woollcott, noting...
...with-it mood allows for crazy- acute characterizations that spin the spectator off balance and give him a giggle in the process. The whole oddball cast, which includes a movie buff's dream clutch of 17 Hollywood directors,* plays the moments of pathos as easily as the streaks of melodrama and farce...
...autobiography that Fevvers tells to the skeptical Walser is, except for the business about the wings, standard 19th century melodrama. It begins with the heroine abandoned in a basket on the steps of a London brothel. A Cockney prostitute, noticing the downy lumps on the infant's shoulders, accidentally gives the foundling a surname: "Looks like the little thing's going to sprout Fevvers." Years pass, and the child earns her innocent keep about the house by posing as Cupid in the drawing room, while commercial sex flourishes around her. Then comes puberty and the improbable onset of pinions. With...
...normal things," she says, "but for now I just want to get better, better and better. If the Olympics did anything for me, it renewed that desire." Her winter has been eventful. Several days after the fact was only casually reported to Oregon police, Mary described a melodrama in which she played Little Nell to a mugger of undetermined size and indistinguishable features who jumped from his bicycle and knocked her down almost in the fashion of Zola Budd, savaging the same hip. He threatened to kill her with a knife but she escaped to flag down...
...tale of how this censorship occurred is the first and by far the longer part of this volume. Editor Barry Menikoff, a professor of English at the University of Hawaii, promises to reveal plenty of melodrama and skulduggery: "A story of stylistic abuse by printers and proofreaders, of literary abuse by publishers, editors, and friends, and finally of the abuse of art by Stevenson himself in sanctioning the publication of a corrupt text...