Word: melodrama
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...much for truth. Much of the book's melodrama comes from Roberts' account of abuse by a father he describes as angry, violent and a killer. The late Marvin Roberts, a horse trainer in Salinas, Calif., beat Monty with a chain, so goes the account, when the seven-year-old boy began to question rough, traditional training methods. These beatings, writes Monty, went on weekly for several years. Worse: during World War II, when Marvin worked as a policeman, Monty saw his father disarm a knife-wielding black soldier who was trying to hold up the Golden Dragon...
...stopped resisting the idea of Leslie and Sarah as ludicrous and illogical, I began to appreciate them. Their characters were both the best-written and best-acted part of the play. With their entrance towards the end of the first act, they invigorated what had been a tedious melodrama about one couple's relationship (something we all see enough of at home) and turned it into a comic drama with abrasive edges. Leslie and Sarah put a necessary stop to Nancy's whining and Charlie's obstinance. They interrupted a fight which easily could have continued inconclusively for several years...
Bainbridge's spare style ensures that her work is entirely free of sentimentality or melodrama. What she doesn't say becomes almost more important than what she does; readers are left to decipher the twisted relationships of the characters--the fact that Myrtle willingly bears George's children because his highborn wife cannot, for instance--as best they can. There may be love in this novel, but there is little that is sweet...
American History X, a confused, randomly compelling family melodrama, is at the center of a Hollywood controversy--not, so far, over its grim subject matter but over the firing of director Tony Kaye during editing. Thus it's hard to know whom to blame for the film's choppiness, its mixture of rage and sentimentality, the stridency of some of the acting...
Though the lack of plot continuity adds comic flair to the most serious interchanges, the text of The Compleat Wrks really isn't much different than what you'd find on 10 randomly selected pages of the Riverside Edition. With men playing women, pathetic melodrama, the overuse of gaudy props (i.e. silly string which makes several repeat appearances as a vomit substitute) one begins to wonder if this isn't Shakespeare as it was meant to be. A frequent object of ridicule throughout the show are Shakespeare companies that fret about making Shakespeare accessible to modern audiences. The show suggests...