Word: passional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...while he worked for Rockefeller Center in Manhattan and gained attention for recognizing the A.F.L. as the bargaining agent for center employees. Labor never forgot, and many unions later supported him in his campaigns for Governor. But there were limits to his liberalism. Indulging his passion for modern art, he commissioned the well-known Communist Artist Diego Rivera to paint a mural for the center. When a likeness of Lenin began to emerge on the wall, Rockefeller hastily sacked Rivera and destroyed the offending mural. It was replaced by a more appropriate work, featuring Abe Lincoln and Thomas Edison...
These dancers, you see, are gay. It seems overmuch has been made of this--the book is about passion first, and gay passion afterwards...
They whirl around the discotheques, the baths, and the men's room at Grand Central Station, with their clear plastic belts and work boots and Technicolor T-shirts, till Sutherland overdoses and Malone disappears into Long Island Sound. Passion is a cancer; eros and thanatos, interwoven...
...certainly becalmed. One obvious flaw is the casting. Shaw's hero, Jack Tanner (George Grizzard), who doubles as Don Juan, is meant to be a clever and intense young idealist, full of revolutionary ardor. He is in the grip of what Shaw calls a "master passion," and his iconoclastic views are contrasted with those of a fossilized former liberal, Roebuck Ramsden (Richard Woods). Grizzard works hard. But he is visibly too old for the part and lacks the psychic energy needed to fuel the evangelist in Shaw's most fervent heroes...
...Shaw could be divided into four elements, they might be fire, music, mind and rhetoric. The fire and music are quenched in this revival; the mind and rhetoric are unquenchable, as is Shaw's master passion, his abiding love for the English tongue...