Word: playlets
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AMERICA HURRAH, and bravo for Playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie for the inventive dramatic form and sharp philosophical content of his three-playlet investigation of life in mid-20th century U.S.A...
AMERICA HURRAH, and bravo for Playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie for the inventive dramatic form and sharp philosophical content of his three-playlet investigation of life in mid-20th century U.S.A...
America Hurrah, by Jean-Claude van Itallie, is a three-playlet wedding between pop art and the theater of cruelty. It is an off-Broadway trip through an air-conditioned blightmare towards an icy emptiness at the core of American life, the land of the Deepfreeze and the home of the rave, of the neon smile and the plastic heart...
...first playlet pits four masked interviewers against four job applicants. Fretfully, slavishly, the applicants answer like students who have forgotten to do their homework. Eventually the counterpoint of questions and answers gets so wholly garbled that the dialogue sounds like one of those elementary conversation books for learning a foreign language. Then the play opens out into a kind of choreographic ritual of modern life, urban herds shuffling to and fro, the commuter's lock step, a cocktail party. It is apparent that interviewers and applicants alike need help: instead of the bread of life, they are fed vacuous...
Life's 21-in. dwarf, TV, is parodied in the second playlet, and what might be merely predictable is so superbly done that it provides porcupine-quilled social comment. The third playlet is simple and startling. A huge papier-mache Mother Hubbard doll intones a litany of all the beauties of the motel room that she owns, conjuring up memories of the garish comic horrors of the journey through a Sahara of motels in Nabokov's Lolita. Into this room tromp a man (Conrad Fowkes) and a woman (James Barbosa) looking like plaster casts with comic-strip blow...