Word: plot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mainstage director Stephen Kolzak has adapted the play to contemporary Europe, drastically altering the context of Ibsen's plot. Much of the play is a dialectic between Alving's vision and Manders's morality; modernization of script and set has reversed their roles. What was once Alving's radical individualism becomes the commonplace assertion of a "liberated woman." Manders, formerly the embodiment of societal mores, is now the anachronism: his fervent preaching seems too silly to be evil. In the 1970's, fighting convention is convention and criticizing the establishment is the main chore of that establishment...
...dialogue could never be considered first-rate. His ear for the nuance of speech is unsurpassed at times; he makes the reader feel like an eavesdropper. O'Hara does not just record speech patterns--his role is a vital one, he controls even the most intimate conversations to further plot and character development. Some of his short stories rely almost exclusively on the spoken word. In "Two Turtledoves," the brief story of two lovers meeting in a deserted New Jersey bar on Christmas Eve, he employs this technique masterfully. O'Hara describes the lovers completely through the conversation...
...even a partisan like Bruccoli will admit that O'Hara's novels never quite measure up to his short stories. He had matured as a short story writer. By the 1960's, the early wandering sketches he had published in the New Yorker had gradually evolved into well-plotted and elegant short stories. If, as Norman Mailer (another Nobel-chaser) once wrote, the real short story writer is a jeweler, then O'Hara's best short fiction has the brilliance of carefully polished jewelry. O'Hara's later short story style depends on a clean, taut prose that unobtrusively serves...
Many Nigerians suspected foreign complicity in the latest plot, though there was no evidence of that. Students stoned the U.S. embassy and the British High Commission, where windows were broken and cars burned...
...soft-spoken, polite man, Packwood smiled at passersby from his niche on a small plot of frozen lawn, but showed no aggressiveness in nabbing the potential voters in their number--all of which left one reporter wondering whether God had a chance in His battle against Communism with soporific soldiers like this...