Word: priggish
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Britain's Queen, said the young English nobleman firmly, presents to the public the personality of "a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for confirmation"; her manner is that of a debutante, her speaking style is "a pain in the neck"; her court is outmoded; and those who surround her "are almost without exception of the 'tweedy' sort...
...Gardner Tillson's mischievous Mercury is marred by awkwardness and profuseness of gestures. Jane Hanle was generally apathetic as Alkmena but conveyed Alkmena's conquetry and supicious insight. She deserves credit for stepping into her role on one day's notice. Paul Fithian's fatuous Amphitryon, Henry Franck's priggish Trumpeter, Ellen Whitman's inappropriately uncosmopolitan Queen Leda contribute to the carnival of characters who romp through the play. Giraudoux's classico-modern play is typical of many twentieth century French plays that use classical myths to reveal unexpected truths about contemporary social or political conditions. Contemporary problems treated...
...than a performance full of the juices of life. But Claire Bloom, 26, was a prize Juliet who made even her more hackneyed passages sound fresh. Looking no more than the 14 Juliet was written to be, she was as soft and warm as a tea cozy, even if priggish NBC censors did raise her neckline by 3½ inches...
Theodore Dreisser's depictions of that same suffering, Alfred Kazin asserts in his effective essay defending the novelist, was rejected by priggish "elderly virgins of the newspapers." Kazin's thesis that Dreiser has been the victim of vacillating American literary taste, is well-argued and convincing...
Henry's jigger is his beautiful wife Katy. To John Rivers, a slightly priggish minister's son and a sexual teetotaler at 28, Katy is a lyric goddess, distant and holy as Dante's Beatrice. When a siege of illness puts Henry in an oxygen tent, John's Platonic devotion is rudely shattered. A shivering, sleepless Kate finds her way to his bed one night and stays there...