Word: nicely
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Nice and Decent. "The Deadly Theater" is an all too common experience. One has only to sniff the garbage that piles up on Broadway and London's West End every season. But Brook is interested in subtler forms of deadliness, an anemia that saps Shakespeare as well as silly plays. He feels that each drama must be reborn rather than merely remembered and repeated, and that rebirth is fully as difficult as birth. A play dies when too vast a gap develops between it and the life around it. The exquisite mandarinisms of the centuries old Peking Opera...
There is also a deadly spectator who helps kill drama. He is the theatergoer whose only conception of good theater is that it be nice, decent, reassuring and uplifting, but never marrow-chilling or soul-devouring. Playwrights themselves propagate dead plays, since most of them cannot fulfill the single most demanding requisite of vital drama: "A playwright is required by the very nature of drama to enter into the spirit of opposing characters. He is not a judge; he is a creator. The job of shifting oneself totally from one character to another-a principle on which all of Shakespeare...
...trilogy that began with A Garden of Earthly Delights, spooks the suburban-castle country of the upper middle class. Author Oates has but one message in her demonic little tale: behind the suburban facade lie corruption and madness. To hear her tell it, American husbands and wives are nice clean-cut vampires planting stakes in each other's hearts. And there is always the monster in the playroom...
...brutal murder in a small provincial town: Claire Lannes kills her middleaged, deaf-mute cousin for no apparent reason, hacks up the body in a cellar and dumps the pieces from a railway bridge onto various passing trains. If there is one thing Madame Duras likes, it is a nice crime of passion, the bloodier the better. Shots, screams, strangled cries, murdered wives and jealous husbands recur in many of her stories, and so does a restless and tormented heroine. Claire Lannes is only the latest in a long line of broody ladies who are young no longer, neglected...
Paul's troubles begin when Lewis Miles, a young, mysterious asexual acidhead, jumps in front of Dorothy's car. She takes Lewis home as if he were a wounded bird. It turns out to be the first nice thing anyone ever did for the lad, and he responds by knocking off anyone who threatens Dorothy even slightly. Cleverly, mind you. No indictments or messy trials, just plausible suicides, auto accidents, and prop guns that turn out to be loaded...