Word: methuselah
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Somebody," George Bernard Shaw once said, "must take the Garden of Eden in hand and weed it properly." Obviously, the man that Shaw had in mind for the job was himself. In Back to Methuselah, his five-play cycle completed in 1921, he tried to settle once and for all the meaning of creation ac cording to the Shavian doctrine of creative evolution. Written when he was 65 and for once heedless of commercial practicalities, the drama is frankly intended as his philosophical summa. Unfortunately, as a new London production by Britain's National Theater makes clear...
...that is evolving along "the path to godhead," and if civilization is to advance or even survive, he must learn to live to a riper, wiser age. Over the next 300 centuries, he begins working his way back to Adam's 1,000 years, or at least to Methuselah...
Tuned to Pitch. Running for six hours over two evenings, Methuselah takes on life and force most often in its acting. Paul Curran and Harry Lomax gleefully caricature Lloyd George and Herbert Asquith as, respectively, fatuous and feckless. Charles Kay, made up to resemble Shaw, touchingly yet comically portrays one of the last of the 31st century's "short-livers"; Philip Locke and Jeanne Watts lend a glint of intellectual ecstasy to the bald, sexless ancients of the future. In such performances, the strands of Shaw's sometimes garrulous argument are tuned to a fine pitch, so that...
...highly talented manager, John A. Hannah, 66, might well be running some huge corporation in Detroit or Pittsburgh. Instead, he has spent 27 years running Michigan State University in East Lansing-a record tenure that entitles him to bill himself as "the Methuselah of university presidents." To admirers and critics, he has also come to symbolize that unique American institution, the land-grant college, of which M.S.U., founded in 1855, was the prototype. One of his admirers, President Nixon has now tapped Hannah to head the Agency for International Development-an appointment that should win swift Senate approval and please...
...freckle-faced Bantams-Mike Kirchner, 12, and his brothers Jeff, 10, and Fritz, 9-honed their gritty style singing for coins on the beach at Venice, Calif., recently landed a recording and five-picture contract with Warner Bros. They are already TV veterans, are now shooting their first film Methuselah Jones, the saga of a sub-teen preacher who sings all his sermons...