Word: miserableness
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...possible excuse for the authorities not paying off the women with at least a week's advance. Granted that the persons handling Harvard's financial affairs have to do it carefully and wisely, it is absurd for the richest university in the country to act like a penny-pinching miser. The University does, to some extent, act charitably in employing women on part time who would otherwise have difficulty in finding comparable work elsewhere, but last month's case gives no sign whatsoever of any feeling of responsibility toward these underpaid workers, many of whom have served the University...
...oftentimes too narrow confines of our existence with the madcap and improbable style that good farce demands. All the elements of farce are present and accounted for--mistaken identities, chance meetings, characters hiding beneath tables and inside closets, young innocents seeking thrills and happiness, a pig-headed miser trying to foil them, and minor characters of vast experience and questionable virtue. What the play point-blank suggests to the audience, in the moral pronounced before the final curtain, is that we should all free ourselves for some adventure in life. And with the small-town good sense that...
...line, however, between charming farce of an innocent 1880's and the hideously sappy antics of a Booth Tarkington imagined era can be very thin. When the older clerk in miser Vandergelder's store convinces the junior employee that they should each kiss a girl on their secret daylong journey from Yonkers into New York, the boy protests. "I'm thirty-three," says Cornelius. "I've got to begin sometime." "I'm only seventeen," Barnaby retorts: "It isn't so urgent for me." It's an aptly humorous exchange. But when Barnaby does receive a kiss, the stage directions call...
...Woody, who? Nobody, really. The Allen persona - the urban boy-chik as social misfit - is, of course, an act, a put-on, no more the real performer than Chaplin's tramp or Jack Benny's miser. Still it does contain grains of truth, along with lecithin, gum arabic and .2% sodium benzoate to retard spoilage. Like all great comedians, Allen consumes his roots, and very often the public schleprechaun blurs into the private comic who would rather talk about anything but himself. As he admits, even his most outrageous gags are a form of autobiography, a reflection...
...just this sense of control that makes this production, as well as the play itself, so appealing. For it's strangely reassuring to stumble upon a world in which the chance happenings and momentary pleasures contribute to the pattern of the whole. It even gives the miser's hoardatory role some semblance of justification...