Word: portraits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...agent's dream. The New York Daily News's critic hailed Heidi's recent arrival on Broadway with this pronouncement: "I doubt we'll see a better play this season." The other New York papers, as is the custom, chose to let their off- Broadway reviews stand. An "enlightening portrait of her generation," declared the Times, while Newsday poured on the laudatory adjectives: "smart, compassionate, witty, courageous." There were some sharp dissents. TIME's theater critic, William A. Henry III, complained that "Wasserstein has written mostly whiny and self-congratulatory cliches...
...only beginning to throw off such literary sparks, and Amy Tan's bright, sharp-flavored first novel belongs on a short shelf dominated by Maxine Hong Kingston's remarkable works of a decade or so ago, The Woman Warrior and China Men. Tan's book is a wry group portrait of four elderly and feisty women who emigrated from China to the U.S., and their grown, very Americanized daughters. "A girl is like a young tree," says one of the stern mothers, who explains to her daughter that she lacks the necessary wood in her character. "You must stand tall...
...realistic and too intricate to be called a nursery rhyme for moderns. But he and his actors and designers do push out beyond the purely naturalistic. All the figures in his dismal urban landscape carry a carefully calculated moral weight, and their story is clearly intended as a microcosmic portrait of contemporary English life. So call it, perhaps, a fable on the sneak. And call it something else too: yet another carefully handmade ornament of the new British cinema, which includes such small recent marvels as My Beautiful Laundrette; Rita, Sue and Bob Too; Withnail and I and Wish...
...portrait of a generation, Wendy Wasserstein's new play is more documentary than drama, evoking fictionally all the right times and places but rarely attaining much thorny particularity about the people who inhabit them. The plot, such as it is, often seems like an unconscious cartoon of feminist dialectic. Two men stay close to the title character through the years: a pediatrician who is handsome, earnest, dedicated, kind, politically correct from a left-wing perspective and irreversibly gay, and a heterosexual who is grasping, impatient, domineering, shallow, as undependable as quicksilver and, for Heidi, sexually irresistible. This is the there...
RICHARD BURTON: A LIFE by Melvyn Bragg (Little, Brown; $22.95). This meticulous biography includes generous quotations from the subject's letters and his 350,000-word private diary; the result is a portrait of a vivid actor who approached language with the same passion he lavished on Elizabeth Taylor...