Word: metaphor
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...story-of a studious imp who dresses up as a boy and contrives to marry her best friend's fiancee-into a moral tale about three victims of circumstance and prejudice. She has found in this faraway fable aspects of her own autobiography, and made Yentl a metaphor for the long struggle of womankind to emerge into the lonely splendor that is Streisand. For her male co-star she hired Mandy Patinkin, who has wrapped his crystalline Broadway tenor voice around Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, then gave him no songs to sing; all eleven are Streisand solos...
...enough for a cineast just to make a horror picture about a young woman who literally gives birth to her nightmares, then copulates with the beast. The film must also be an up-front metaphor for the cosmic anomie of Western civ, and, to boot, a bilious satire on the smugness of the nuclear family...
Once upon a time, a dark time in a mean place, a child was born, a black child, born to be a running back, born to be a metaphor. His name was Marcus Dupree. The place was Philadelphia, Miss., and the year was 1964, less than a month before three civil rights workers were murdered there and then buried 15 feet under...
That squalor, the play's major motive force, makes the production worth squirming for. Shepard's tools for inducing that Squirm aren't much subtler than the "starving class" metaphor of the title, which, despite numerous references in the dialogue, never surpasses the self-conscious (they're emotionally starving, you see). Emma (Molly White) the younger of the two gawky adolescents, is having her first period, as the mother constantly reminds father and brother to excuse her behavior. Wesley (Steven Gutwillig), her brother, urinates on a heap of Emma's painstakingly drawn posters. Shepard isn't one for the soft...
...when faced with nature's endless secrets. "It is not just that there is more to do," he writes, "there is everything to do." Urgent notes are struck, especially in the title piece. The final strains of Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony no longer evoke a musical metaphor for death's natural release. The long string passage now stirs images of the world's end. The reason for the change is that the sage has been caught up in the nuclear arms debate: "Words like disaster and catastrophe are too frivolous for the events that would...