Word: overblown
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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LEFTISTS and rightists at Harvard share a tendency to reject all activist militance as empty militance. Conservatives predictably reject nearly all student activism as overblown. Leftists themselves are also to blame, though, for rejecting innovative options. Reluctant to appear too radical, activists here rarely deviate from the norm of University Hall rallies. COCA's recent tactics are undoubtedly militant, and unusual for Harvard, but they are anything but empty...
Unfortunately, playwright Christopher Durang seems convinced that the audience will not understand his message unless it is beaten into them, and his script frequently employs a baseball bat where a fly-swatter would do. The result is a production which, while entertaining, is pretentious and overblown...
...director Amy Cabranes accepts Durang's heavy-handed script much too readily, and rather than toning down the rhetoric, Cabranes has the actors hype the play's already overblown elements. Hernandez's bubble-blowing, Snoopy-wielding analyst comes off well the first time, but a constant repetition of the same sight gags and crazy word substitutions (Hernandez says "porpoise" when she means "patient" at least six times) rapidly becomes unconvincing. Some subtlety would have been nice; we don't need to see Hernandez in a pink nightgown with a teddy to know that her behavior is childish...
...living tradition" in a society: "What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." Such an abominable opinion cannot be excused, yet Eliot has defenders who find the issue regrettable but overblown. British Poet D.J. Enright notes, "A friend of mine made the best observation: 'But good Lord, he did not like anybody.' " Critic Alfred Kazin seems inclined to set Eliot's lapses in a larger context: "As a writer of Jewish background, if I had to ignore all the great writers...
...truth, these two stories of drug usage are unrelated, and the importance of drugs in either of these tragic scenarios is more than likely overblown. The wealthy, suburbanite cocaine addict more often than not is succumbing to largely psychological pressures: stress, family problems, etc. The crack dealers in the inner-city are acting largely out of sociological pressures, and more fundamentally than that, economic ones. In both cases, drugs hardly seem to be the source of either problem, they are merely an avenue of expression, dangerous though the path...