Word: melodramas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Such melodrama tics, Minuchin believes, bring about a temporary exorcism of the anoretic's fear of open disagreement with her parents and become a rite of passage. The girl will eventually begin to eat, but the next problem is to keep her from slipping back to her old ways. Family therapy is then begun; parents and child get together with Minuchin for sessions in which they discuss their underlying pressures and conflicts...
...when she inherits the fortune of her great-uncle Douglas, the fifth Baron Rhodes. In short order she marries her titled cousin Niles and thus becomes a countess. Whether the marriage is an improvement-whether, in fact, it is a marriage -is a question that remains open till the melodrama's final scenes. Niles is charming and affectionate but in an oddly distant mode. Months after the wedding, Clara remains utterly ignorant of the process by which her species reproduces itself. It is clear that Niles is unduly influenced by his improbable mother and by a coarse, swaggering manservant...
...melodrama in the play seems less high-flown when you have the melodrama of the author's own life and background to refer to. When you know that Hellman had an elegant aunt who was actually a morphine addict and the lover of her black chauffeur, who so resented the large loans she had made to her husband--the one who was having an affair with a Cajun girl--that she would never communicate with him except through the medium of her son Honey (a slightly off-beat character himself, who tried to rape Hellman when she was fourteen...
...miserable attempt to impress the self-consciously cultured Marcus Hubbard (she tells him that her uncle taught her to love Mozart, but in answer to a question reveals that the instrument he played on was a little drum"), but her irrepressible earthiness finally leads her to puncture the melodrama directly. Indignant at the way Marcus is treating Oscar, she tells him off the way no other character would dare to: "A Papa talking about his own son! No animal would talk about their own son that way... You old bastard...
...when Laurette is not on stage giving the audience its cue to laugh at all this--which is most of the time--the humor tends to get lost in the melodrama. It isn't fair to blame the actors or the production entirely for what is, at least in Hellman's eyes, the failure of the play. The play is intended to be uneven, in the sense that it veers from comedy to tragedy, and it is often difficult for both the audience and the actors to keep up with it. As far as the acting, it calls for deft...