Word: nebbishness
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...other words, Durang foregoes the aura of imperious authority that other leading playwrights create for themselves. Like them, Durang writes about the impossibly difficult problem of getting through life, but he refuses to be pretentious enough to offer a solution. In person, Durang approaches the ideal of the nebbish: short, pudgy, quiet with a polite smile. He's not even that funny to talk...
...intimidation and expertly applied guilt. "Someday you'll remember how you sucked away a mother's life!" she cries at her frustrated and repressed son, Ralph, still at home at 22 and still stuck working in rich Uncle Morty's garment warehouse. Ralph's father, Myron, is an ineffectual nebbish; his sister Hennie a nasty, frustrated romantic; and his grandfather, old Jake, an unreconstructed Bolshie from the days of the Wobblies...
THOUGH THE Salkinds may not have realized it at the time, finding Reeve was a luckier break than getting the Newmans. Almost the perfect physical match for a Superman, he could project the boyish charm that made both the ego-busting muscleman and the nebbish newsman palatable and credible. Underneath the red and blue Reeve kept enough of the sly midwestern farm boy to make Superman's schizophrenic life a myth rooted in the American ideals of silent strength and self-effacing mannerisms. None of the Superman films ever fully descended into campy self-parody, because Reeve made...
...promising "leads" (lists of hot prospects); from these come "sits" (in-person meetings with the customer) and the hallowed "closing" of the deal. This month the agency is holding a contest among its four salesmen: Roma (Joe Mantegna), the slick master of sympathetic patter; Aaronow (Mike Nussbaum), an aging nebbish trudging on the treadmill of anxiety; Moss (James Tolkan), bullet-headed and bull-tempered; and Levene (Robert Prosky), a salesman on a long losing streak, who can beam like a bishop at good news and just as quickly turn to wheedling for his job. Running herd on these macho individualists...
Lawyers shouldn't be out to win popularity contests, but Dershowitz's grating nebbish image must have lost his some cases and persuasive appeal. The Best Defense's perfunctory jibes at press-conference attorneys seem to bely Dershowitz's own legal behavior. The contradiction muddles the issue of just whether "the best defense" in the genteel world of American law has a place for grand-standers like himself...