Word: prose
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even for great American prose writers, the theatrical muse has been a bitch. Henry James' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's plays were disappointments; Saul Bellow's The Last Analysis lasted less than a month. Thus Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer and Collaborator Eve Friedman find themselves in distinguished company with Teibele and Her Demon, a "fable" for Broadway...
...lyric short stories and novels, Singer's prose is suffused with drama. In the theater, his work becomes prosaic. The notion of a girl deceived by a man who does not change his costume or his appearance demands a magic that neither the manic cast nor Director Stephen Kanee can sustain. For this tenuous fantasy, an entertainment tax is difficult enough. A credulity tax is insupportable. - Stefan Kanfer
...Pilgrim Society in Plymouth, Mass., his famous home town. He happens to be black. Gomes (rhymes with homes) notes wryly that his parents raised him in "a rather backward environment in which language still had some validity." The Plymouth schools thereafter drilled him in memorizing large chunks of great prose and poetry, a skill he retains...
...father, a Columbia University professor, commits an unacknowledged theft from a Cheever short story when commenting on his older brother: "What can you do with a man like that?" Even an apparently innocent comment by Salley carries, given the name of the author, some ironic freight: "Graceful prose was never my father's strong suit...
...distinctively Woody Allen's quality that he doesn't say these things; he limits himself to lighter moods. Conscious that his comedy doesn't do justice to the world around him, he won't permit himself to generalize. The airs of Yacowar's flimsy elevated prose exactly betray this caution. Yacowar has written a worthwhile book about Hitchcock's British Films - we need books about Hitchcock, since it's dismally current for people to think of him as 'the master of suspense,' the public property, grand and genial. Most film criticism tends to be dull, especially the kind which tries...