Word: mordant
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Andromache is a production of mordant humor, bitter irony and moral force -- if also of significant miscalculation and highly uneven acting. Some of the performers are tripped up by Eric Korn's half-arch, half-vernacular translation, in which vulgarity and clumsy colloquialism ("Is death the net result of all my love?") clash with the neoclassicism of the set and costumes. The plot is a sour inversion of the lovers' tangle in A Midsummer Night's Dream: Orestes (Kevin McNally), son of the murdered war hero Agamemnon, pursues his cousin Hermione (Penelope Wilton), daughter of Helen of Troy...
...state, he faced bleak prospects: the official campaign to discredit him had taken on undertones of anti- Semitism, and his work was being subjected to the annihilating silence of suppression. So he composed "The End of a Beautiful Era," a poignant elegy on past illusions with a mordant conclusion about the future: "For the innocent head there is nothing in store but an ax/ and the evergreen laurel." Last week the eerie prophecy in these lines was fulfilled. Joseph Brodsky, 47, involuntarily cut off from his homeland in 1972, was given the Nobel Prize for Literature...
...crusty moralist in MacDonald -- familiar, especially, from his gratifyingly mordant asides in the Travis Magee books -- finally erupts when Rowan and his wife split up. Rowan castigates the self-sufficient woman his wife has become and complains that he wants his "compliant, noncombative, dependent, absorbed-in-me girl back." MacDonald responds with two long, tough letters describing Rowan's attitude as an "adolescent dream" and maintaining that his celebrity has given him an "iron insistence upon being totally right in all things." After this, does Rowan take MacDonald's well-intentioned scolding to heart and renew the friendship...
...asked a Parisian or a New Yorker in 1886 what sculpture was, the answer (after a short blank stare) would have been: statues. Statuary, to borrow the mordant phrase of Claes Oldenburg many decades later, was "bulls and greeks and lots of nekkid broads." The sculptor of that day was responsible -- as in the age of film, TV and other ways of mass-circulating the visual icon he is not -- for commemorating the dead, illustrating religious myth or dogma and expressing social ideals. The aim and meaning of the work were rarely in doubt. With statues, good or bad, from...
...Baseball Abstract. Though less compelling than some of its nine predecessors, this year's version includes some refreshing observations on the overrating of the Cardinals' rookie outfielder, Vince Coleman, a long and brilliant account of the managerial chess game played at the 1985 world series, and a mordant treatise on the beloved and blinkered manager Chuck Tanner, who somehow failed to notice that his Pittsburgh Pirates clubhouse had turned into a drug den (beat reporters, please copy...