Word: parlous
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...martial law in Calcutta. Amsterdam has just been accidentally A-bombed into, as an American major (Sterling Hayden) puts it enthusiastically: "Twenty-eight square miles of white ash." The U.S. magnanimously offers to pay reparations to the five survivors, but settling of accounts is of secondary importance in such parlous, fissile times...
Thanks to Arabs, environmentalists, and Nader's Raiders, among others, the long American love affair with the big car has distinctly chilled. In the face of fuel cutbacks and a growing resistance to new jetports, air travel is more parlous than ever. As the clickety-clackers have insisted for decades, there is no realistic alternative to mass transportation in the U.S. but the nation's once-magnificent railroad system. Even given the highly unlikely return of abundant fuel, the U.S. could not indefinitely tolerate or afford the poisonous pollution, cost, congestion, racket and uglification of a transportation system...
Being named as a potential heir apparent to Mao is a parlous honor in China today. That was the position held by the late, disgraced Lin Piao, who, according to Chou, promoted the heresy of "the naming of only one successor." Chou confirmed publicly for the first time the story of the former Defense Minister's death last year in a plane crash in Mongolia (TIME, Nov. 22) and threw in some previously undisclosed details. As Chou told it, Lin had plotted to assassinate Mao and seize power in 1971, after he came under criticism in the party...
...CLAUDIUS Hurtling back through history for a couple of millenniums, we encounter the parlous state of Rome in decay as depicted in I, Claudius. Historical plays of this sort are like a cram course with illustrated color slides. The audience can never quite settle down to the entertainment for fear of some impending exam. Knowing the names of the characters does not really help, since their natures change with bewildering rapidity. Click: here is Messalina gamely struggling to protect her virginity from Caligula. Presto: here is Messalina, Empress to Claudius, cuckolding him wholesale in the foulest brothels of Rome...
...limits of the play are clear precisely because the current off-Broadway revival is as good as one can legitimately imagine. Man's parlous state on this spinning planet is beautifully rendered by Henderson Forsythe's Vladimir and Paul B. Price's Estragon. As the slave Lucky, Anthony Holland mimes with the aching dignity of a Marceau, though his master, Pozzo (Edward Winter) is a shade too Blimpish. This is Alan Schneider's finest piece of directing since Virginia Woolf-sentient, taut, sharp as the image in a jeweler's glass...