Word: poignant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...white American who avoids Harlem missing something? Yes: for starters, a poignant and profound social textbook lying open for study in the heart of a great city. One gazes at block after block of abandoned brownstones -- their fronts corked by arson, their doorways cemented shut, their empty windows gaping like a skeleton's eye sockets -- and realizes that agonizing irony is Harlem's chief industry. Perhaps, then, the European tourists are seeing things. Yes, they are: spectacular things. Any tour of Harlem compresses into a few square miles the melodramatic contradictions of urban life. Horror dwells in the basement...
This year, however, Louisville is on the upswing. Four of the seven shows at the just completed festival seem sure to have further life; one is among the freshest, funniest and most poignant works seen on any U.S. stage this season. Though the writers included Broadway stalwart Arthur Kopit, novelist Harry Crews and columnist William F. Buckley Jr., the best script, aptly for Louisville's tradition of discovery, came from regional-theater veteran Constance Congdon, whose works have never been produced in New York City...
...this guise Babbit eloquently pleaded for a more caring American government--pointing out the poignant irony of Chileans who care more about the franchise than Americans jaded by protected freedoms; of a Japanese economy that innovates better than the great original innovating, entrepreneurial power, of Paraguayans who recognize the centrality of human rights more than Americans did under Reagan. He used the success of America's principles in the world to show our own lapses. It was powerful rhetoric, if necessarily incomplete...
...danger is in believing Klimov and his colleagues can produce an ideal creative climate. But Soviet filmmakers know not to expect too much. In Vyacheslav Krishtofovich's poignant comedy Lonely Woman Searching for a Life Companion, a seamstress places a personal ad on walls around her town. The results are dire. The first man to answer the ad insults her, tries to rob her and then leeches on her kind nature. A trio of Young Pioneers, encouraged to take pity on the "sick and the lonely," offers to take her for walks in the countryside. She nearly loses...
...Italian avant-garde before World War I, where this show begins, found itself in a fix under the immense shadow of its own cultural history. Either it made a diverting Oedipal commotion about the loathsome oppressiveness of the past, like the futurists, or immersed itself in poignant reveries about its authoritarian and alienating beauty, like Giorgio de Chirico and his associates in metaphysical painting...