Word: mordant
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...dozen first-rate holdover shows reflect the steadily improving quality of the fare in off-Broadway playhouses: Little Mary Sunshine, a musical spoof of old-time operettas; A Country Scandal, an early Chekhov play produced professionally for the first time in the U.S.; The Balcony, Jean Genet's mordant and amusingly symbolic study of politics in a brothel; The Connection, a plotless, devastatingly naturalistic, jazz-counterpointed evening with a collection of junkies; Krapp's Last Tape, a one-actor one-acter by Samuel Beckett, throwing a man's youth into the face of his age, produced...
Although some San Franciscans are so set in their ways that they still play dominoes, San Francisco claims to have nurtured more contemporary trends than any other U.S. city. The Bach-toned jazz of Dave Brubeck first took flight there about a decade ago. The mordant political satire of Comedian Mort Sahl found its first audience 6½ years ago at San Francisco's hungry i. And the beats were nowhere until they settled down in San Francisco pads...
Billy almost never does, on screen or off. Inside a head that makes him look like a benevolent old bullfrog resides a restless imagination, a "flypaper memory" and a wit that ranges from the merry to the mordant. Wilder, not Benchley, was the man who first said: "Wait till I slip out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini." He is also the author of this scathing epigram: "I would worship the ground you walk on if you lived in a better neighborhood...
SOME ANGRY ANGEL, by Richard Condon (275 pp.; McGraw-Hill; $4.50), marks the third appearance of an ironist whose iron holds a keener edge than most. After his fine, mordant first novel. The Oldest Confession, he did a few handstands to attract attention, and the result was The Manchurian Candidate (TIME, July 6). an impressively comic but chaotic novel whose message-all is vanity and venality, and even the noblest of men knows not the way to the washroom-was not always audible over the author's sousaphone accompaniment. The present book appears to contain the same admonition, though...
...play has its weak points: by becoming melodramatic, the action seems a little too manipulated, and it is intricate and talky in getting under way. But even then it is an action in the service of a theme. Playwright Hellman's old mordant power is in evidence again and again, but Toys combines it with a broadened sense of humanity. Always sharp at characterization, the author of The Little Foxes has become more probing and wide-ranging about character. She has passed from human greed to something at times no prettier but much more universalizing: human need...