Word: overwrought
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What I can laud is the warm sense of cooperation which seemed to motivate the actors in these two parables of verbal aggression. They were acting in overwrought sets and from a scrawny conceptual framework. But they were acting at and with each other, in ways one could sense were both familiar and fun. Perhaps this, more than artistic polish, is what the HTC has to offer; and I intend the remark not in denigration...
...come from believing you understand your vanity, is most harmful. Johnson writes of the treachery and hunger of the human heart and imagination: the need for hope, and the folly of self-deceptions which languish life away in the gloom of anxiety. Chekhov writes of the misery of overwrought people struggling to maintain self-control against unhappiness they do not understand. Both writers see themselves subject to the same errors and anxieties. Johsnon, despite his reputation as a prodigious moralist, majestically ordering life with indefatigable lucidity through the irresistible ebb and flow of his periodic prose, as profoundly melancholy...
...lover-fool. He is richly talented, abundantly sensitive. He cannot come to terms with life only because he has not lived it in any sense except the harmful one of self-created symbols. The act of killing the seagull is romantic and comic; it shows his yearning and his overwrought emotional symbolizations. His little play sounds like Words worth rewriting Manfred. It is the funniest satire of its kind since Dickens' Two Transcendental Ladies in Martin Chuzzlewit ("Mind and matter glide swift into the vortex of immensity. Howls the sublime and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers...
...much pitched as rigged. Gielgud lends the part a tremulous, blinking dignity, but he can only play it the way Shaffer wrote it: as the milquetoast of human kindness. Like the devil, the devil's advocate has all the best lines, even if many of them are overwrought and overwrit. It is Magee's poet-haranguing, seducing, at once flailing out with and wincing from his own lash-who jolts the play occasionally into the corrosive credibility it ought to sustain throughout...
...best way to describe it is to say we all got overwrought about it." Helmer explained. "We've managed to resolve the matter satisfactorily without too much fuss. It wasn't malicious, and it wasn't insane." he said. "It won't happen again...