Word: norman
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...there's a bittersweet quality to the new Broadway revival of Ayckbourn's celebrated trilogy The Norman Conquests. First produced in 1973, it's one of his most grandly entertaining works: three plays that chronicle the same traumatic family weekend in an English country house from three vantage points - dining room, sitting room and garden. It is packed with laughs, brimming with stage tomfoolery (a character who leaves the dining room in one play shows up in the sitting room in the next) and staged superbly by Matthew Warchus, in a production first seen at London's Old Vic Theatre...
...some ways, it's a shame. The Norman Conquests is so damned funny (though grounded, as Ayckbourn's comedy always is, in real human emotion) that it may simply perpetuate the misconception of Ayckbourn as a skilled boulevard entertainer. Which would leave American audiences still largely ignorant of the astonishing body of work by - controversial-pronouncement alert! - the greatest living English-language playwright...
...several rooms in one stage space or go backward in time or branch off into different permutations, but his formal ingenuity is matched by his ability to create incredibly vivid, fully realized characters who live on even after they've left the stage. The multiple perspectives prove it: Norman, the randy assistant librarian who puts the moves on two sisters-in-law, reveals new sides in each room, scene and play...
...That willingness to push the envelope or touch the borders of what’s okay is still definitely alive.” Unquestionably, some of the Advocate’s most notable alumni have been the most iconoclastic. Hanlon cites past “Advokats” Norman K. Mailer ’43, Frank O’Hara ’50, and John L. Ashbery ’49 as writers who followed their own ideas about writing rather than obeying the status quo, a central tenet of the Advocate’s philosophy. MAKING HISTORY...
...central player in the publication scene on campus, eschewing the traditional incubatory institutions for a would-be-writer, opting not to take part in John H. Updike ’54’s Lampoon, David L. Halberstam ’55’s Crimson, or Norman K. Mailer ’43’s Advocate. It was when he was eight years out, in 1999, after a stint as a critic at the Village Voice, that Whitehead began to make noise with the release of his first novel, “The Intuitionist,” which...