Word: ponderator
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Looking at The Ponder Heart is much like watching the village idiot for a couple of hours--the experience can be amusing, but it leaves a strangely bitter after-taste. The pitiful "hero" of the play, Uncle Daniel Ponder, is in fact a sort of village idiot of a small southern town. The inheritor of a vast estate, he grew to middle age without ever growing up. He spends his time playing with the local children, but some obscure loneliness finally drives him to marry a backwoods girl he picked up in a soda fountain. When the girl...
Authors Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodrov, however, do not search for comical situations in a plot which obviously has none to offer. Instead, they unmercifully exploit the humorous possibilities of Ponder's eccentricity. As a result, it is practically impossible to laugh with a character who must have been whimsical when short story writer Eudora Welty first created him. One has to laugh at him if one is to laugh at all; a lot of cruelty lies hidden underneath the glib surface of the comedy...
...short story to the play. He acts with an abandon very funny to watch, adopting a southern accent just sugary enough to be humorous without becoming cloying. His manner is full of comical inventions, except for some distracting gestures. But even Wayne, for all his talent, cannot make Daniel Ponder anything more than a pitiful, lost child...
...Naturally, one must not rush headlong into the definition of words as delicate as bouillabaisse (should it, or should it not, include a slice of floating stale bread?), or to the admission of such Americanisms as bluff (accepted). So, with only the deadline of immortality to achieve, the academicians ponder the verities, polish their language and, each year, award a prize to some young Frenchwoman who, "born in comfort, but forced by Fortune to work, prefers a life of honest and honorable poverty to that offered women who choose wealth, to the detriment of their honor...
...galaxy of judges, and some 700 lawyers and laymen met Thursday, Friday, and Saturday to debate and ponder "Government Under Law" at the Marshall Bicentennial Conference...