Word: motheral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seeing us would know anything true," notes twelve-year-old Ann August. She and her mother Adele represent a history of shoplifted dresses, bad checks and unfurnished apartments. One epochal day, Adele flashily abandons small-town Wisconsin and whirls to Hollywood, aiming to snag a rich husband and make her child a star. At the Pacific's edge, Ann gently nourishes another dream: to outgrow people like her mother, "who start the noise and bang things, who make you feel the worst; they are the ones who get your love." Finally, Adele taunts once too often...
...Broadway audiences were chilled by The Bad Seed. The title character of that melodrama was a homicidal moppet whose appearance was so angelic that no one but her mother suspected the hidden crimes. British Novelist B.M. Gill has given the premise a sardonic twist: in Nursery Crimes, wicked little Zanny repeatedly confesses to several murders but is so widely disbelieved that she concludes her sins are minor, subject to a penance of three Hail Marys. At home, at school, in church and even among the police, grownups fail her. The story's most compelling relationship unfolds between Zanny...
...other characters are all commentators on the tragedy. Each member of the triangle has a family that serves as a chorus. The Groom has a Mother (Rebecca Clark), who sees even in a harvesting knife a reminder of the deaths of her husband and elder of son, and the likelihood of a similar fate for her remaining son. Leonardo's Wife and his Mother-in-Law (Ashby Semple) sense Leonardo's increasing distance. The Bride has a Father(Daniel Hurewitz) and a Servant (Lisa Peers), who notices her strange reluctance as the wedding approaches...
What Garcia Lorca's puppets of fate lack in characterization and human complexity, they make up for intensity of emotion. All the actors give appropriately intense performances, but Clark's Mother, Brody's Wife and Gasser's Bride deserve special mention. Clark and Brody offer true anguish at the impending loss of their men, and Gasser convinces that she is torn between her fiance and the man fate decrees...
...really ignore the product? Can we--will we--allow ourselves to take capitalism to its extreme? Will we all become straight-line economists, caring only for supply and demand and giving not a thought to what the supply and demand is for? Is the surrogate mother's child really comparable (let alone analogous) to a work of art? A work of art may be a part of the artist who creates it, but it surely is not human. No matter how beautiful, it will not grow into adulthood, complete with a psyche of its own. If he insists on using...