Word: metaphoric
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...minute for 19 years. The. President has used a similar metaphor. In a speech unveiling his economic program soon after he took office, Reagan dramatized his concern about the national debt, then approaching $1 trillion, by noting that it would take a stack of $1,000 bills 67 miles high to equal that total. When he brought out his new budget this month, Reagan failed to mention that his deficits would push the debt to $ 1.8 trillion by next year and raise his stack of $ 1,000 bills to more than 120 miles...
...impulse toward poetry seems to burn more hotly in playwrights than the impulse toward literal truth. The conjurer's tricks of the dramatist-metaphor, epigram, literary allusion and the fateful juxtaposition-somehow feel more artistic than the precise evocation of life. That attitude seems to have gripped even one of the stage's most adroit neorealists, Marsha Norman. She won her reputation with the 1979 drama about a woman's leaving prison, Getting Out, and last year received the Pulitzer Prize for 'Night, Mother, a mundanely detailed conversation over cocoa and marshmallows between a daughter...
...other emotions as she faces the choice between her institutionalized life and the freedom of being with Rourke--choosing differently each chance she gets. Tracey's life at home and in school is represented so shallowly--her bedroom, for example, is decorated in flowers like a cheap innocence metaphor--that her indecision seems fickle rather than agonized. Her passion for Rourke takes on the same superficiality, and Hannah's performance becomes a mere foil for Quinn...
...Jean Simmons in a toy-theater production of Hamlet.) The second is that both grew up to be men of the working theater, practical poets striv ing for the memorable effect. Many of his selections are in fact from speeches in which Shakespeare insisted on the stage as a metaphor for the world. A scholar might find this oversimplified, but show folks have always had to seek a human-size passageway into the labyrinth of the great Shakespearean texts. The cheerful energy this approach releases in McKellen and the air of confidentiality it gives his evening are entrancing...
...incidents, and may feel that if these two women could be made one, all the right connections would be made for him. Their evening together is a contest of wills. If one of them can impose his or her version of the past on the others, then that metaphor will control not one life but three. But at the end they are sprawled in various attitudes of exhaustion and despair, with the truth still lying somewhere in between...