Word: poetic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fully imagined characters who are never reduced to political placards. The plays are realistic, even old-fashioned, in style but sprinkled with mysticism and magic: ghosts, visions, seers and a matriarchal figure named Aunt Ester, who recurs throughout the series and lives to the age of 366. With their poetic, often meandering dialogue, the plays typically start slow (anyone who says his eyes have never drooped in the first act of an August Wilson play probably isn't being honest), but build to thrilling, sometimes violent, often otherworldly, climaxes. And although the last one, Gem of the Ocean, almost didn...
...started writing poetry, then poetic plays, and then (after moving to St. Paul, Minn., where his work was first staged at the Penumbra Theater Company) developed a realistic style laced with melodious dialogue inspired by the early blues songs he loved. He was influenced by the work of playwright Ed Bullins--who showed him that "you could put black folks on stage as black folks"--but was pretty much a theatrical naif. He hadn't read Shakespeare (except for The Merchant of Venice in school) or Tennessee Williams or virtually any of the other modern American classics. There was some...
...lyrical text demands extraordinary acting. The players must give credibility to moments of farce, such as a refrigerator filled with nothing but artichokes, or a brother urinating on his sister's chart for a 4-H science project. Yet they must also preserve enough dignity to bring off sustained poetic speeches, including a climactic account of a midair battle between an eagle and a cat who doom each other to a fatal fall. The showiest part is the father (Eddie Jones), a brutal alcoholic who undergoes an overnight conversion, too late, into a sober and responsible man. His place...
Although no one in the group sang, two members of the band occasionally interrupted the languid, drawn-out notes of the violin and base with readings of passages of Italo Calvino’s book, Invisible Cities. Perhaps too obscurely poetic to be fully grasped or even enjoyed, the band’s bizarre music, nevertheless, had a calming, almost hypnotic quality, which sadly was periodically obliterated by intentionally jarring outbursts of radio static. There is no need to say that the band continuously kept its audience guessing for what would come next...
...asking each other, “what’s that I smell/see/hear?” while responding with musings on each sense. The two performers work well together; both are unassuming and casual while maintaining both conversational sense and a steady rhythm and emotional intensity befitting of their poetic dialogue...