Word: poignant
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...North House staging of Betrayal may lack the refinement of a professional production or the 1982 film, but despite a few flaws, the show provides an excellent opportunity to see poignant drama in action...
...often thankless part. As the first of the Auroras, Susan Jaffe was able to drop much of her cool languor to give a sprightly performance. For one of the Lilac Fairies, MacMillan dipped into the corps to find Jennet Zerbe, 22, a tall, ample dancer who gave a poignant impression of authority and extreme youth...
...pale after a while, and maybe Glen shouldn't have to run smack into a cactus. But who can blame the Coens for blowing up their tale into conventionally funny shapes? Besides, as the brothers demonstrate at the climax, round is funny too. And more than a little poignant. The plot circles back to the quints' nursery, and then to the McDonnoughs' bedroom, where Hi has the strangest dream he dare consider. It is a vision into the future perfect, of middle-class stability and continuity, of a purloined child growing up to be a college football star...
...speak of their homeland with attempted distaste: "In Eastern Europe, nobody has a sincere smile except drunks and informers." They echo Poland's subjugation: they yearn to be Russian refugees, who they believe are more in fashion, and wish they had Russian goods to sell. But in the most poignant scene they feel compelled to telephone someone, anyone, back home, just to ask how things are. After realizing that everyone they can think of has emigrated, gone to prison, committed suicide, become a collaborator or retreated into paranoid fear of the state police, the wife sadly dials the number...
...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...