Word: piteously
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...third triumph is Robert Moberly's ludicrous yet piteous Sir Andrew, whose cough cannot conceal a basically pasty-faced visage. For him plant stalks are a snare, his nose a source of itching, he skin a meal for flies and mosquitoes. Moberly is amazingly inventive; he runs the risk of submerging Anddrew in a dictionary of shtick, but succeeds in making it all work. I do not recall ever seeing any of Shakespeare's peripheral comics played more engagingly...
...their mock family ties, the characters have neither significant pasts nor coherent motives. The ranks of terrorists may indeed be filled with such hollow, existential punks, but a novelist can hardly let it go at that. Theroux himself cannot seem to decide whether their emptiness is contemptible or piteous. And since they contemplate violence as an end rather than a means, they lack the framework of a political cause that might define them...
...WRITING in A Woman Named Solitude is so surely tied to the psyches of its characters that this chronicle of slave revolt in 18th century Guadeloupe is nothing like a parade of piteous horrors. Andre Schwarz-Bart, a French Jew who survived Nazi camps and Resistance fighting and has already given us one masterpiece, gets into the mindscape of each French colonial and transplanted African tribesman. He dramatizes their religious and political tensions with precise evocations of war and ritual, and he compresses his narrative to unsentimental essentials. The book is both poem and protest; more than a simple howl...
...Virginia's history dramatized the miseries of a sick person, for, she was, on occasion, as mad as the March Hare. She fought a painful battle against the possibility that the next attack of insanity would paralyze her permanently. Clearly, Virginia Woolf in Bell's biography is quite often piteous...
...chandeliers. Save for a shaky Abscheulicher! in Act I, Soprano Leonie Rysanek as Leonore rescued her mate Florestan from Pizarro's dungeon with a heroinism that any latter-day Women's Lib leader would envy. Tenor Jon Vickers gave glorious vocal heart to Florestan's piteous degradation. Austrian Stage Director Otto Schenk clothed the production in medieval-dungeon darkness that gave way brilliantly at the end to the blinding whiteness of day-and freedom. Though the Nazi-like greatcoat worn by Pizarro (formidably portrayed by Baritone Walter Berry) was an irrelevant touch, the eyeglasses he took from...