Word: mintz
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Dant's Purgatorio and Shakespeare's King Lear serve the same function for Purgatory as Milton's Paradise Lost did for Mintz, supplying characters, plot details and many of the show's cleverest lines. The thematic link between the Lear and Purgatorio motifs is the search for a missing woman who represents some kind of an ideal. For LaZebnik's Lear, who is both actor and director in a play about himself, it is Cordelia who is lost, while for Thomas, the young male lead, it is the elusive Adeline, who takes the place of Dante's Beatrice. Since Tome...
...were Mad about Mintz, you may well be disappointed by Philip LaZebnik's latest offering. American in Purgatory is basically warmed over Mintz; shorter and more tightly-knit than its predecessor, it features many of the same actors bandying about similar jokes and singing similar songs within the now almost predictable absurdist framework that has become a LaZebnik trademark. Somehow it all seemed a lot fresher the first time around...
While Mad about Mintz was salvaged by a stunning second act, some of the most effective sequences in American in Purgatory come near the beginning. LaZebnik is at his sharpest in a parody of psychoanalysis, where the analyst (David Reiffel) exults in his patient's lapses of memory and tells him pedantically that his suffering is necessary, since "only through suffering can you achieve pain." In another beautifully controlled sequence, an imaginary monopoly game becomes a metaphor for life; in this game without dice, escape from jail is possible only through strategems appropriated directly from The Wizard...
Jacqueline Mintz, associate provost for affirmative action at Yale, said yesterday Yale does have many women in the research ranks, "where it seems women were more acceptable...
...humor--this particular facet of Weller's play becomes the mainstay of the Dunster production. David Alpert gives a skillful and sophisticated performance as the roguish Mike who masterminds the comic scenes. His sidekick, played by Andy Berger, is a lackluster second fiddle. Andrea Gordon as Ruth and Nikki Mintz as Kathy speak their lines self-consciously, sounding unnatural saying "fuck" and "shit"; it's as though the Jackson twins have bedded down with the entire high school football team...