Word: plotlessly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...could be said to be jealous was Shakespeare; Henderson concedes the Beard's criticism of the Bard to have been often "provocative, unilateral, unjust, savage and false." And he credits Shakespeare with teaching Shaw "the technique of ultra-naturalism in dialogue," just as Moliere schooled him in "the plotless conversation piece," and Dickens showed him how to exaggerate characters "far beyond verisimilitude...
Though the plotless play is overlong and sometimes cumbrous and clumsy, these weaknesses-as not often in O'Neill -have their value. The repetitions, for example, are in character, as coming from broken-willed people with a neurotic need for the solace or savagery of words. The plotlessness is the measure of their impotence. The play's language-merely straightforward and blunt, except where the self-dramatizing old actor and the word-conscious young writer empurple it -has in the theater far more trenchancy than the half-poetized prose so frequent in O'Neill. Even the lengthiness...
...most creative new play was British Writer Enid Bagnold's witty, elegantly savage The Chalk Garden. Even more finely tempered was Tiger at the Gates, Jean Giraudoux's humanely ironic lament for the Trojan and all subsequent wars. Audiences might argue whether Samuel Beckett's puzzling, plotless Waiting for Godot was profound art or a mere philosophic quiz show; less arguable was the neatness of its writing, the desolation of its mood. In Lillian Hellman's sharp adaptation, Jean Anouilh's The Lark proved a lively stage piece; under Tyrone Guthrie's vivid direction...
Under the Bed. Author Chevallier is obviously out for a fictional romp, and even people who deplore his easy tolerance can enjoy his plotless prattle. Marcel Aymé, as able a writer as any in France, is no more inclined to scold sinners, but his tightly plotted yarn is a more sardonic, more pointed comment on the human comedy. The Green Mare has some of the quality of a fable, as well as some of the inescapable judgment of life that every good fable offers. In the farm town of Claquebue most human feelings and actions are taken coolly...
Died. Gustave Stubbs Lobrano, 53, who as The New Yorker magazine's managing editor for fiction since 1941 did much to set the tone and style of the plotless "New Yorker story"; following an operation; in Chappaqua...