Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Alfred, an assistant professor of English, read the prologue and first act of his unpublished verse play, Hogan's Ghost...
...first play shows us Mr. Malcolm, a sloppy middle-aged failure and exconvict who has turned to left-wing writing and the bottle. He is confronted after eight years by his twice-divorced ex-wife, a 40-year-old beauty "carved in ice"--vain, mendacious, and desperate--who "can't face getting old." Their reconciliation at the end, we know, will be short-lived. All the other hotel residents are lonely too, but they hate to admit...
...gilded cherubs and bare-breasted angels, Cellist Casals shuffled in from the vestry on short, hesitant feet, bearing a brown-grained viola da gamba by the pegs. When he motioned the audience to its seats with his bow, his movements were crabbed with age. But when he began to play, the vast, hollow church filled with luminous, lucid sound, suffused with a passion that is the wonder of musicians the world over. Each night the audience paid Casals the only tribute permitted in the church, rising to their feet and standing in hushed silence...
Comedy of Manners. Author Barth is assistant professor of English at Penn State and, unlike most teachers of English, he likes words well enough to play with them after school. His first novel, The Floating Opera, was runner-up for the 1957 National Book Award in fiction. Now The End of the Road reveals him as a very funny (but notably unfrivolous) writer...
What is good in The Horn is its good try at isolating the serious jazzman's special brand of musical thinking. Like most good jazzmen, The Horn had the stuff in his blood. He taught himself to play because nothing else seemed to him more worth learning. His mother took in washing; his father was a railroad hand who advised his son to get some kind of steady colored man's job that carried a sure weekly wage. But Edgar Pool could hear nothing but the music within him. So he played, badly at first, but doggedly...