Word: poignant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Arthur Miller is the American Ibsen, a gifted domestic dramatist who instead prefers political crusading, onstage and off. He and his characters have seemed to inhabit a world of clear-cut right and wrong. This personal history gives poignant impact to Miller's new one-acts, collectively titled Danger: Memory!, at New York City's Lincoln Center. One is a kitchen slice of life between elderly friends, the other a charged and almost surreal interview between a hostile police detective and the father of a murder victim. What links them is a parallel revelation: in each, a man about Miller...
...That poignant valedictory, like almost everything else in A Walk in the Woods, has the ring of political truth. Playwright Lee Blessing apparently was inspired by a real-life walk in the woods, between U.S. Negotiator Paul Nitze and Soviet Delegate Yuli Kvitsinsky, during arms-control talks in Geneva in 1983. His wry and engaging new work at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Conn., persuasively imagines the human fabric of a similar fictional enterprise. Blessing's conceit is that the Soviet negotiator, far from a stereotypical xenophobe, is worldly, glib and cynical, while the American newcomer is stuffy...
Whatever happens, Duncan will come away from Harvard with a poignant sense of the two cultures he has spent the last five years of his life transversing...
...Sophie Tucker. Midler's good-timey raunch made her famous as the Divine Miss M, a creature she once described as embodying "everything you were afraid your little girl would grow up to be -- and your little boy." The image obscured her rightful claim as the most dynamic and poignant singer-actress of her time: a 5-ft. 1-in. Statue of Libido carrying a torch with a blue flame. Her phrasings were as witty as Streisand's, her dredgings of a tormented soul as profound as Aretha's, her range wider than all comers...
...problem of bisexuality is especially poignant in the world of the arts and entertainment, where sexual exoticism in general is more tolerated than in society as a whole. Virtually every arts institution has suffered its losses, and the community is on guard. "Anyone who's dating in the fashion community worries," says a lingerie model with the Ford agency. "You just don't know." Before engaging in sex with a man, she dates him five or six times, and, in an effort to protect herself, asks for a complete sexual history and finally insists that he use a condom...