Word: olsen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Tell Me a Riddle, by Tillie Olsen. In these four short stories, the author writes with skill and compassionate knowledge of the radicals and working stiffs who fought the battles of U.S. labor when labor was still a movement...
...most striking style is that of Tillie Olsen, whose "Tell Me A Riddle" won first prize. Using an original kind of interior monologue, Miss Olsen chronicles the movement toward death of an immigrant Russian Jewess. Her husband cannot until the final scene sympathize with her, and her children have become sickeningly Americanized. She wants to be free, to live within herself, "and not move to the rhythms of others." Her health is failing, yet she resists medical care ("I need no doctors"). Her husband calls her by epithets that evoke stock characters: but she is not a stereotype...
...tell her what she already knows, that she is dying. But she cannot get close to her family; they talk of cars and supermarkets and amusement parks while in her mind she recalls the simpler joys of her youth. She is an uprooted; it is a credit to Miss Olsen's style that one can come to the Jewess' cry--"Where now? Not home yet?... Not home yet? Where is my home?"--and not despair of its baldness. The final scene is, as Poirier notes, "brilliantly timed," a climax of power evoking a grand release of tension in the reader...
Those who have been in known that it epitomizes all insane in American society Gold's choice of setting the effect of his message. max of this fine piece is al effective as Miss Olsen's flecting backwards over gone before, one sees how lessly Gold foreshadowed...
...Charles Olsen, who directed the production, chose to accent the melodrama, which is a good idea for most of Miller's plays. But there is no way to dilute the false rhetoric and high mindedness which keep All My Sons from being pure and pleasant melodrama. Bill Simpson's sets were garish and out of keeping with the tone of the play...