Word: peddlar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hunter's camera creates characterizations with considerable skill. Lerner, who has the lean chops and darting eyes of a nouvelle vague flesh peddlar, is obviously claustrophobic beneath the heavy angles and oppressive ceilings of Adams House. But outside his own room, he pays for a heightened freedom of movement with his inability to be at ease or in scale against alien objects or in alien environments. He's lost, often quite literally, insuch differing surroundings as a mortuary-like IAB shower room and the lush mechanical complexity of the Loeb shop...
...Purgatory" is the second Yeats play, and it is done equally well. This is a return to words alone, an exercise in concentrating enormous action into a handful of lines. The meter is irregular, there is no choral interlude, only the talk of a peddlar and his son standing before a gutted house. The talk shimmers with movement and tension: we watch the house become alive with terrible memories. The peddlar has killed his own father in this very house, and a family cannot purge itself of a crime its blood passes on. Each generation reenacts a family sin until...