Word: melodrama
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...more than just the imagined mask of a calculating evader of justice. Over a fifteen month period-- from the shooting spree of March 1981 to the June verdict of the following year--Hinckley was to emerge as the enigmatic author and protagonist of what he himself called "my melodrama...
...lyric best, Williams gave us the powerful tension and drama of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). In Vieux Carre, written more than 20 years later, it has become more difficult for the author to rise above melodrama. And while we've certainly come to expect the simplistic repetition of the themes, there still is a limit to how much we can stomach of lines like, "People die of loneliness ...loneliness is so thick in this house, you can feel it,' and "There's no defense against the truth...
...people, each wrapped up in his own problems and personal crises, each suffering from his own particular brand of loneliness. The tragedy of them all living in a house with paper-thin walls and yet still so lonely and so insulated, is something that Jennings lifts out of the melodrama, bringing it up to Williams at his best. As Williams's stage alter-ego, the Writer chronicles it all for us, commenting to his landlady, "I've learned so much here ... I should be paying you tuition...
...harbinger of a trend. In the main, Hollywood pictures since the mid-'70s have been sexually arid. Even the horny teen romps use the erotic impulse only as the setup for an anatomical punch line. Among the box-office hits of 1984, only the Clint Eastwood melodrama Tightrope had much to say about the dark night of the libido, and much of that was muffled under the bang-bang of a climactic chase. For that matter, De Palma and Russell are eccentric outsiders, and so are their new movies...
Unfortunately, that parallelism doesn't extend much farther; the dissatisfying, sometimes maudlin poetry and overt melodrama of Calderon's play - bears little resemblance to the bard's more skillful lines. Yet despite the flaws in the play, this Agassiz production does an admirable job in bringing Calderon's 350-year old imagery to vibrant life...