Word: playlets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Having enlisted the audience's sympathies, and its knowing nods that the first playlet shows what life is really like, Sherman reveals in the second half that Table is not reality but invention -- the plot, in fact, of a famous '60s novel that a Hollywood producer proposes to contort into an MTV- influenced musical. Sherman's sprawling, ambitious piece has any number of themes, most powerfully the idea that art comforts us by letting us focus on microcosmic disasters so that we can ignore the global ones. Dominating an exceptional cast are Rupert Graves as the young artist...
Rossellini pedals off, for an hour or more, through a dozen or so takes of the cow playlet. As she waits at rest for the camera to roll, her resemblance to her mother, Actress Ingrid Bergman, is powerfully clear: the wide cheekbones, the astonishing directness, the serene impression of physical and moral strength. In motion, as she smiles and gives the flower to the cowherd, she flashes the life and openness that were, she says, the unforgettable traits of her father, Film Director Roberto Rossellini. These characteristics are not physical. It does not seem especially important to catalogue her face...