Word: plot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...unfortunate cinema franchise: McNeil Simon's. Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon '47 reprise their classic roles as messy Oscar Madison and natty Felix Ungar in the sequel to Simon's comedy classic, but the result is as flat as a Quarter Pounder without the cheese. The excuse for a plot, the erstwhile roommates' road trip through California en route to their children's wedding, can't support the lack of the genuine humor that characterized the original. And the stale performances make this movie about as palatable as New Coke. --Elizabeth A. Murphy...
...plot has been provided for those members of the audience who require one to maintain the interest...
This is mostly because of the play's unique structure: twenty-one short scenes, "Simple Techniques for More Effective Communication," among which, out of sequence, are presented four events crucial to the "plot." These are revealed in a separate scene (brilliantly acted by Director Jonno Deily-Swearingen '98, as a Harvard prof) to be "TRYST," "WARNING," "THREAT," and "MURDER"--elements amounting to a predictable techno-thriller badly in need of satire, involving a boy genius (Chuck O'Toole '97), a spy (Paul Monteleoni '01), a democratic revolutionary (Jessica Shapiro '01) and several lunatics...
Once this inner plot starts making sense (not, one could argue, until the "Diagram" in scene 14) it's fun to piece things together. But this task is often distracted into a fumbling account of the scores of #'s literary references. Some of these references are disjunct and capricious, but the best, like the Interlude of scene five, are masterpieces of intertextuality without being "coterie items. "Rising from trash cans borrowed from Beckett, Ezra Pound (Yu) and T.S. Eliot (Marler) offer up literature. In a later scene, Pound, with Robert Lowell, reflects that he "began with swollen head, and ended...
...from the Ex. Last weekend's production, under director Ollie Lewis '00, sacrificed most of the appeal of the canonical in favor of a quirkily idiotic yet thoroughly entertaining reinterpretation. Under all the pageantry, music and the interpolated jokes, the viewers might not have been able to follow the plot, but they almost undoubtedly had a rollicking good time...