Word: mps
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Stoppard gathers a committee of imprudent MPs and gives them the task of rooting out immorality among their colleagues. As members of this special committee each inadvertently reveal pairs of panties pulled from back pockets and briefcases, you start wondering what has happened to Stoppard's proverbial cleverness. In Jumpers he used stage acrobatics to poke fun at and illuminate complicated philosophical questions; here he finds no better use for age-old sight gags than to keep his audience interested between long recitations of names of English inns...
...simple bawdy humor and recovers his quirky intellectual muse. In the original London production of the show, the company had a sense of proportion, and carefully understated the strangeness of Stoppard's dialogue to make it sound more believable. Thus the show's introductory sequence--in which two MPs arrive in the committee room and converse for several minutes using only foreign cliches--succeeded through the lack of self-consciousness on the stage...
...know every government official by his first name, is the centerpiece of the show in more than just a visual way. Stoppard starts this character out as an unembellished dumb broad, and about halfway through the show transforms her into a voice of the common people, instructing the MPs on their duties, telling them, "The people don't care about what you do on your own time--it's only the newspapers," and eventually writing the draft of the committee report...
...gray, drizzly dawn breaks a little ominously. The Boston Common, almost always busy with some activity, is strangely calm early Monday morning except for the muted chatter of the National Guard MPs and the demanding squawk of their walkie-talkies...
...subway starts to roll. Waves of passengers greet the frowning guardsmen. "This way, ma'am, stay on the other side of the yellow rope," the MPs say, and they all do as they are told, most walking down Tremont Street in search of a coffee shop. Dunkin Donuts, the first to open, sells 6 dozen donuts in under a minute, and the proprietor stares with dismay at the disappearing stocks of crullers and jelly-filled. "Shit, we need more donuts. I should have made more donuts," he mutters...