Word: nymphomaniac
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...novel takes place about twenty years from now, in a large English manor where four English aristocrats (one with a fear of losing his teeth), three dissolute Americans (including a nymphomaniac and a Timothy Leary type), one whore and one dwarf have gathered for a weekend of debauchery. Given the strange passions of some, sexual ambivalence of others, and a wide range of futuristic drugs, it is not surprising that Amis is able to generate more than two hundred pages of sordid situations...
...play opens with Dr. Prentice preparing to physically examine a prospective secretary, Geraldine Barclay (Susie Fisher). "I wish to see what effect your stepmother's death had upon your legs," he tells her, but his examination is interrupted by his nymphomaniac wife (blatantly portrayed by Deborah Marie Hayes) and one of her pursuers, a bellboy played by Michael Blau...
...actors handle the slapstick humor with great dexterity, but despite these generally competent performances, the play's humor--which is all it really has to offer--comes off lamely. The depths to which this humor repeatedly falls is demonstrated in a conversation between the nymphomaniac Mrs. Prentice, and the inspecting psychiatrist, Dr. Rance. After Mrs. Prentice informs the Doctor that a pageboy in a local hotel tried to rape her, he asks her if the boy succeeded. She replies in the negative and the doctor responds "Well, the service in those hotels is terrible...
...hearing rumors about myself from the slightest of acquaintances that I began to realize the extent of my notoriety. And those rumors were rich. I'd learned that I was the biggest bitch to hit the 'Cliffe; that I was the most promiscuous miss in town, well-nigh a nymphomaniac; that I was, get this, a Moaner, a Screamer, a Scratcher; that I was the Body-by-Fisher Fisher (I wasn't) and as a baby heiress I'd been promised to a son of my daddy's tycoon pal; that I was a Lesbian...
...Despite ample surrealistic high jinks, such as having poor dead Dad fall out of the closet as stiff as an ironing board, the underlying tone of the play is lethally bitter. The adolescent hero is in the steely grip of a domineering supermom, and when a lupine nymphomaniac attempts to seduce him, the scene more resembles cannibalism than sex. His only destiny seems to be Dad's closet...