Word: panic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...BIRTHDAY PARTY, by Harold Pinter, is a 1958 play written prior to The Caretaker and The Homecoming. Party lacks the dramatic sophistication of tone, tempo and themes of the two later plays; yet the telltale stigmata are all here-dread, panic, menace, mocking comic absurdity, the evasive unwillingness of people to level with each other. Except for Edward Flanders, the American cast is often blunt and plodding when it should be sardonic, cutting and athletic, but Pinter nevertheless provides prickly excitement and a tantalizing quota of questions without answers...
...carefully, he gripped a gun in each fist and stalked into the plant. Then he started shooting with a calculated frenzy that filled his fellow-worker victims with two and three bullets apiece, at least 30 shots in all. One bullet shattered a transformer, adding darkness to the sudden panic; yet throughout his ten-minute rampage, Held displayed the calm proficiency of a man who has mapped his assault in advance. Shot dead were Supervisors Carmen H. Edwards and Richard Davenport, Lab Technicians Allen R. Barrett and Elmer E. Weaver, and Superintendent Donald V. Walden. Picking his targets with care...
Ironically, the 300 Harvard and Radcliffe anti-war demonstrators have been plagued by that same confusion, that same feeling of impotence, for more than two years. But their frustration has now reached a pitch of militancy verging on panic--or revolution. "This war is such a wretched extremity that almost anything is justified," said a sympathetic Faculty member. "I think it would have been right to take the Pentagon apart stone by stone," Hillary Putnam, professor of Philoosphy, added. "The war continues unabated although millions of Americans are now against it. Because of the undemocratic nature of our society, there...
...Pinter. In a season that began with unqualified disasters, this is the first qualified success. A 1958 play written prior to The Caretaker and The Homecoming, Party lacks the dramatic sophistication of tone, tempo and themes of the two later plays. Yet the telltale stigmata are all here-dread, panic, menace, mocking comic absurdity, the evasive unwillingness of people to level with each other. Except for Edward Flanders, the American cast is blunt and plodding when it should be sardonic, cutting and athletic, but Pinter provides prickly excitement and a tantalizing quota of questions without answers...
...becomes apparent that Stoppard owes fully as much to Samuel Beckett as he does to Shakespeare. R. and G. are transparent replicas of the two tramps who wait for Godot. But where Beckett's dialogue almost expires in pauses of resignation, Stoppard's lines pant with inner panic. Delivered with comic ardor at machine-gun speed, R. and G.'s interchanges combine mental verve with spiritual desolation. It is as if the quiz kids of Wittenberg U. found themselves desperate at flunking in life. R.: What's the matter with you today? G.: When? R.: What...