Word: perfervid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ending works, though, not only as a jolt for the audience but also in resolving the drama on its own perfervid terms. Once Alex, the nightmare shrew, has threatened the dream family, she must be faced down by the family. Once Dan has sinned, only Beth can forgive him, by saving his life. Once Alex has invaded the home, she must be killed by the homemaker; the Wife must destroy the Other Woman...
...R.S.C. Cyrano soldiers on at nearly twice that length. More important, Anthony Burgess's verse translation, while lean and clever ("Our devil's changed into a Christian brother,/ Attack one nostril and he turns the other"), irons out the swellings of Rostand's perfervid rhetoric. The direction, by Terry Hands, who also staged Much Ado, is as antiromantic as the translation. It retreats from the play's signal qualities: passion and panache...
Maggie, of course, is a focal point for one of Williams' perfervid, evocative (if dramatically a bit clumsy) explorations of Southern familial passions. Her husband Brick has taken to the bottle and thrown her out of bed in despondency over the death of his best friend and the specter of his own homosexuality. Their marital crisis reaches a boil at the birthday party...
...breed unto themselves," she reports, "devilishly competitive, clever and professional. The chase and the 'hit' [scoop] get their blood up." Cronin, who journeyed from Buckingham Palace to Acapulco last week in pursuit of the royal family, finds her fellow reporters' zeal, if not their perfervid imaginations, infectious. Says she: "I felt myself wanting a fast car with a two-way radio so that I could join the global game of royal-watching, careening over icy alpine roads, slithering through steaming jungles, hiring helicopters and speedboats to find my elusive royal prey...
Perhaps the lesson of these figures is that viewers prefer straight information and quiet talk to electronic bells and whistles. Certainly the perfervid claims of drama and import, when events were inconclusive, turned some viewers off. Television is incomparably compelling in covering real action, yet embarrassingly unconvincing when it tries to manufacture excitement. But there were some statistics that defied optimistic interpretations: the three networks together attracted less than a third of U.S. households on average; even among those who were home watching TV, nearly half turned to entertainment instead. Despite all their hubbub and hype, all their reaching...