Word: passion
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...village, have the opportunity to assert themselves. Eldritch despises Skelly (Robert Gould) for some sexual misadventure decades past, but he is the one, peeping through windows, who really knows the sordid truths which underlie their lives. Gould infuses the twisted, misanthropic Skelly with some of the most convincing passion in the play. Cora (Jennifer Divine), likewise denounced by the villagers, also achieves a down-to-earth honesty with the audience, though without the monologues. And had the role not been somewhat overplayed, the part of Mary Winrod (Miriam Schmir) as a senile old witch might have also stirred some passion...
...what is meant to be a tender yet nonchalant tone, while he and Shakka hold 25 people hostage. "It does not matter!" snaps Shakka. Moving it ain't. Characterization is indicated mainly by silent stares--DaSilva--or wildly darting eyes--Wulfgar. In DaSilva's great moment of fraternal passion, he leans over Fox's bleeding body, shouting after Wulfgar. "I'm gonna fucking get you. You're fucking dead," Salinger would appreciate...
...nearly virginal Harlequin romances, passion never goes above a whisper: "She gasped with helplessness and fright and another subtler emotion that she could not understand." Masters and Johnson could furnish her with a working hypothesis, but even the more oestrous Richard Gallen Books line purrs only a little louder: "Sweet spasms of oneness curled within her." All this heavy breathing is as calculated as a publisher's earnings statement; according to industry surveys, readers want the sex wrapped in euphemisms and the future tied in pink ribbons...
Even worse, the passions which drove noir seem almost charming today. When Roman Polanski made the mock-noir Chinatown, he had to slice open Nicholson's nostril to get the same effect that was once accomplished by showing a couple of thugs lurking outside the window. Leave it to the Reader's Digest to mourn our passing national innocence--but the real problem is we've lost our faith in passion. Murder and passion seem almost antithetical at the present, and adultery--well, adultery is for adolescents...
...filled with loneliness, exhaustion, and fear; fear of God, fear of loss, fear of sin. There is no horseplay in a Gordon novel, no exorbitant fantasy. There is no security for her characters, they do not enjoy life, all stability outside the Church is illusory. The Catholic formula prevails: passion brings scandal, scandal brings dishonor, dishonor brings withdrawal and isolated solace. Gordon's characters are unhappy, but never trapped, they simply have nowhere else to go. Isabel Moore nurses her father for eleven years and is never self-pitying. That she and her father live in a one-family house...