Word: poetic
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...Ironweed was 227 pages of the DTs, a funny boohoo ramble through Nighttown, an interior dialogue between Francis and his ghosts. It won a Pulitzer Prize and a healthy audience for the other novels (Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game) in Kennedy's Albany trilogy, with its wry poetic naturalism. The bums in Ironweed were not noble, but they had their own gravelly, poignant voices. The family Francis left behind was ordinary as linoleum, but their emptiness left a sympathetic ache in the reader's gut. Francis was drab and cramped on the outside, that husk of a booze...
However, a little patience pays off. Flamboyant and cocky, beat poet Bunthorne (Adam Albion) bursts onto the stage, surrounded by a swarm of swooning girls who emulate his attire and shadow his every move, swaying rapturously with every flourish of his poetic pen. The effect is hilarious...
...Lowell group were the poetic heirs of the long-lived constellation of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost. Meyers, biographer of Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield and other troubled writers, persuasively argues that the younger men approached their predecessors "in depth of genius and artistic achievement" but "surpassed them in the extremity of pain." Meyers' fever chart begins with blighted childhoods: each man lost his father young. Each was severely disturbed, opening his psychic wounds and bleeding into confessional verse. But they all went a step beyond, steeping in self- pity, some sabotaging their marriages with meaningless affairs, others sniping...
...most part, Prascak maintains Cocteau's scene structure and characters. His major switch is to replace a talking horse with a small Oscar the Grouch figure, the same Muppet that starred in The Dream Play. This horse-turned-Muppet opens the play with cryptic messages that provide Orpheus with poetic inspiration. It is helpful to keep in mind that this--like much of what else is odd in the production--is weird thanks to Cocteau, not Prascak...
Prascak has also kept much of Ibsen's poetic language intact. However, he inexplicably destroys the poetic effect by injecting banal modernisms into Ibsen's imagery. Prascak peppers the play with pronouncement's like Peerless' "I feel as strong as a Chicago Bear." Is Prascak making fun of Ibsen's lofty verse, or blindly sacrificing poetry for a cheap laugh? I don't know; it's hard to tell...