Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Live." The wildest attempt to shoot down the bill came from Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters and their lobbyist, Sid Zagri (TIME, July 27), but the quiet power play came from none other than A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany himself. Making a personal trip to Speaker Sam Rayburn's office last fortnight, cigar-chomping George Meany growled out the facts of life as he saw them. Labor, longtime friend of the Democrats, could not live with the bill as it was being written, he warned. "We can't live with the hot-cargo clause...
...play has been a ravorite with audiences since its premiere, and has been acclaimed by leading critics as the finest comedy of insult...
...Aiuola Bruciata, the work receiving its first American performance this week at the Tufts Arena Theater as The Burnt Flower-Bed, was written in 1952, near the end of the last great creative burst of its author, Ugo Betti. It is a play that states the problem of modern nihilism with uncompromising starkness and attempts to press beyond in the reaffirmation of human responsibility. Even a cursory reading of Betti's play in Henry Reed's excellent English translation makes it clear why Betti is being hailed on the continent as an even greater dramatist than Pirandello...
...dislodged at all from its absolute "absurdity"; only by acknowledging the gap thereby created between what is and what ought to be, can man still find hope and purpose, be saved from the epidemic in the world ... the look in the eyes of oxen on the country roads." The play gains disturbing relevance of the most immediate sort by taking place among the power elite of one vast political system the night before its confrontation with those of the other side--on the frontier, "the point of attrition between two huge wheels. One half of the world against the other...
...sake of the record, however, I'd like to say that the central character seemed to me to be fundamentally misconceived: Alvin Cohen's Giovanni was not the retired demagogue with the brains and scruples of a philosopher that the play presents, but a diminutive figure of ineffectual gestures who methods his way through one purely visceral crisis after another. Where we should have Trotsky in exile, we get something like Governor Long. Indeed, the major flaw of this production throughout was a submerging of the intellectual tensions in an unrelieved broiling bathos of emotionality. Betti's classic balance...