Word: melodrama
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...Provincetown Players. If, after 40 years, Author Boulton's memory is correct and young Eugene Gladstone O'Neill did woo and win her with the lines she attributes to him, it is no wonder that much of the story reads like a parody of Victorian melodrama. O'Neill once explained that he had trained himself as a playwright by reading "nothing but plays, great plays, melodrama" until "he was thinking in dialogue." Agnes, the convent-educated daughter of a painter, met him in a Greenwich Village joint called "The Hell Hole." As he saw her home that...
...becoming O'Neill's wife (as she did soon afterwards), Agnes automatically became his leading lady as well. Their joint act swung endlessly between tragical melodrama and slapstick farce, was happiest and steadiest whenever they left Greenwich Village behind and settled in Provincetown or New Jersey. Then O'Neill would shed the trembling toper and turn into the contented craftsman, in bed by 11 every night, at work sharp at 9 in the morning. He so hated to be interrupted in his work that he would hide in a closet when company came...
...result, all sorts of plays have been presented on Harvard property, in theaters and House dining rooms. Among them have been a leggy operetta that set one observer talking about "a restoration of paganism"; a steaming drama of the torn-undershirt school; a lurid melodrama of rape, murder, and adultery; and a play about a young man who accuses his mother of making her bed "a couch for luxury and damned incest...
Shadow of Doomsday. Just such an incident was the theme of J. B. Priestley's antiwar melodrama called Doomsday for Dyson, which millions of Britons saw over TV. At Birmingham University a student "peace committee" put on a showing of the film, The Shadow of Hiroshima. The press reported daily the progress of a survey being made of university students by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Though the results were hardly conclusive -e.g., only 1,330 out of London University's 24,000 students even bothered to answer the questionnaire-the press gave the distinct impression that those...
...play uses a classic stage form, the brittle conversation piece. In terms of smart brushes and insulting banter, this has its good points; but seldom were a classic action and a classic method so mismated. 'Stage struggles over a will make for melodrama or serious drama, farce or sardonic comedy, for banged fists, shaking fingers or skinny claws-but not for the playfully brandished rapier. Fencing verbally, the brothers sometimes neatly pink each other, even achieve an occasional moral louche. But they use buttoned foils on synthetic flesh. Nor, in place of human drama, is there any real psychological...