Word: menfolk
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...Glover). All of which would be more inspiring if it weren't for the florid melodrama and tinhorn dialogue. The villainous racists do everything but twirl their mustaches. The shallow plantation wives are cliches of another sort: "If it were not for the slave girls," says one, excusing the menfolk's sexual dalliances, "we women would have to submit to our husbands whenever they feel . . . healthy." The young Queen expresses her romantic outlook in sappy lines like "I want to marry a prince on a white horse...
Thursday at 10 p.m.: "Starving Artist" presents Gigolo Aunts, Menfolk and Letters to Cleo. $5, 19 and over...
What appeals so strongly about Higgins' fiction may be that he lets the reader overhear men sizing up other men, judging them, often not gently. (Mostly men, yes; his women characters tend to be not much more than complications in the lives of their menfolk.) In The Progress of the Seasons, a 1989 book nominally about Boston's accursed Red Sox baseball team but mostly about the author's family, Higgins offers a shimmering truth: Irish Catholic males can't talk to one another about important personal matters. (Scandinavian Protestant males can't either, for the record...
Some young women seem to believe that female self-assertion was invented around 1960. But in bygone times, plenty of housebound wives and mothers found ways to control their destinies, often while cannily seeming to submit to the menfolk. That is what happens with mounting clarity and power in Precious Sons, a rousing, historically apt and splendidly played family comedy that opened on Broadway last week...
...every expectant mother, sends him off to work with the unchallengeable claim: "You can't be where I am, anyway." And sure enough, when he takes her to the maternity ward, a nurse insists that the Ricardos kiss goodbye in the lobby. No husband is allowed upstairs because menfolk have no business meddling in childbirth...