Word: poeticizing
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When the two big laughs come from a bathtub-size salad bowl and a food fight, you can guess that the playwright is flailing. Tina Howe (The Art of Dining, Coastal Disturbances) probably meant ONE SHOE OFF, which opened off-Broadway last week, as a poetic comment on the corrosive effects of professional failure on personal life, combined with a feminist fantasy of zipless fulfillment. Instead of an absurdist Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? her tale of two unhappy couples at a fiasco of a dinner party resembles sketch comedy -- wacky whimsies stitched together, abasing an able cast...
...seems to be the season for savvy playwrights to slip. Neil Simon's musical adaptation of his The Goodbye Girl left out the good parts, David Hwang's Face Value closed in preview, and now Lanford Wilson (Talley's Folly, Burn This) has opened REDWOOD CURTAIN, a would-be poetic musing on ecology, Vietnam, capitalism and multicultural heritage. If you think something is deeply sick in the national soul, then the play, for all its philosophical incoherence and melodrama (about a Vietnamese immigrant seeking her ex-G.I. father), may speak to you. If you live in the world most...
...second part, set in 1987, which describes vividly the initial impact of HIV on this group of friends, flows with more finesse. At the very least, it is more interesting and of more relevance. Much of Indiana's poetic impulse, carried over from his chef d'oeuvre, Horse Crazy, shines through. The sex scene at a former Nazi Concentration Camp, as one can well imagine, carries a poetic power which teems with tension. It most creatively epitomizes Indiana's acerbic and incessant critique of Reagan's few and late policies on AIDS. It also embodies much of the nihilism (brilliantly...
Giorgione appeals more to modern taste because his imagery was more mysterious and poetic, and the idea that painting should mimic the effects of lyric or pastoral poetry, ut pictura poesis, was a favorite 16th century dictum. There is a word for it, Giorgionesque, an allusive quality that comes through even in conventional subjects, such as the exquisite portrait of a young knight surrounded by the gleaming black weapons of his vocation, a dense still life with religious overtones (the handle and pommel of the sword are also a cross), the bony silence of the knight's face contrasting with...
...THEY WANTED WAS A LITTLE POETIC JUSTICE, A bit of free verse. Many poets and coffeehouse owners in San Francisco were outraged over the recent enforcement of an old city code calling for permits in venues where poetry is read. In the case of the Blue Monkey cafe, the permit would have cost $638. Local poets demonstrated and got the ear of Mayor Frank Jordan, who asked the police commission to suspend enforcement of the 20-year-old licensing code (it was amended in 1991 to specifically cover poetry...