Word: pedantic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...very young woman, Hedda had been a kind of platonic muse to Eilert Lovborg (David Newman), a brilliant but dissolute writer and thinker. Out of temperamental fatigue ("I have danced practically all my life-and I was getting tired . . . My summer was up"), she has married an aunt-coddled pedant named Jorgen Tesman. She has moved from a danger that stirred her inner being to a safety that curdles her inner being. Lovborg has since found a new muse, Thea Elvsted (Anne Fielding), a married woman far inferior to Hedda in intellect but considerably more pliant sexually. Tesman...
Kate Reid is the show's weak link as the middle sister Masha (the role originally played by Chekhov's own wife), bored with her marriage to a pedant and fated to be separated from the one man she comes to love. For one thing--and it may be ungallant to say so--Miss Reid can no longer pass for a young woman in her midtwenties. Masha is also the most complicated of the three sisters. Miss Reid has no particular trouble conveying the blunt, even coarse speech of Masha, but she has not sufficiently plumbed the poetic sensitivity that...
...celebrated remarks, Gertrude Stein once wrote, "Remarks are not literature." However, a poet is a poet is a poet, and Robert Lowell is just the poet to refute this pedant. In his first major effort since Prometheus Bound, Lowell has packaged many remarkable remarks as sonnets, 274 of them, to be exact. "I lean heavily to the rational," Lowell explains in a prose note, "but am devoted to surrealism...
...cruel test of audience patience. In recent seasons, a firm of legalistic factmongers - Hoch-huth, Weiss and Kipphardt - has invaded the theater. They shuttle between distortion and documentation, rehashing past history and seasoning it generously with the catchup of guilt. Each of these playwrights is a displaced pedant who pretends to be stretching the mind. In actuality, he is merely inviting the audience to have a good...
EACH YEAR the concept of outside grows more important. The professor, that pedant, may be outside. The graduate student section man, perhaps stuffier still, who wants to grow up to be that professor--he's an outsider. That fellow who studies Greek classics for what seems like 12 hours a day in October and November, and the thick-armed house football jock who says, half in jest, that everyone in SDS should be shot--they're outsiders. The SDSer who talks at you for hours without a smile when you wish he would go away--he becomes an outsider. Your...