Word: protagonists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...great American patriarch will never have it so good again. Clarence Day Sr., the gruff protagonist of Lindsay and Crouse's Life With Father, bullies his wife and children with nothing but a blustering charm--this was one classic stage family that managed to escape sinister Freudian entanglements, tragic alcoholic breakdowns, the crippling gaps between aspiration and achievement and other dark intertwinings of soul and psyche. Life With Father...
Polanski stars as his own protagonist, Trelkovsky, a slight, shy fellow with a personality like a sweaty palm. Looking around Paris for an apartment, he wanders into a building that must have been built in a state of decay. The concierge (Shelley Winters) shows him a flat whose previous occupant, a young woman, attempted suicide by jumping out of a window into the courtyard below. Trelkovsky gets his only glimpse of the girl during a visit to the hospital, where he finds her on a ward bed, wrapped in gauze like a mummy on welfare. She stares...
...last, a modern novel more or less about abstinence. Nightshade's protagonist, Edward Lytton, is 40, devoutly Catholic and astonishingly, since he is four years married, a virgin. He does not mind his asexual life; indeed, he is so Victorian that he can barely imagine any other. Alas, his unfulfilled young wife Amy is not resigned to her condition. She indulges in "fantasies of liquid the color of magenta, a pomegranate redness, viscous to the touch, so that one has to lick it dry." Poor Edward is clearly in for trouble...
...happy news is that all the replacements save one are improvements over their predecessors. Most notably among these is the role of the protagonist, Leontes. Last year's production was seriously harmed by the ravaged voice with which Donald Madden essayed Leontes. Now the part is in the masterly care of Philip Kerr, who has returned to the AST company after a regrettable absence...
DeLillo plunks this passive protagonist down in a futuristic think tank called Field Experiment No. 1. His task, to decode a series of radio pulses being received from the vicinity of a G dwarf designated as Ratner's Star. Billy is soon accosted by a parade of scientists and deep thinkers. Their names (Shlorno Glottic, Grbk, Orang Mohole, Desilu Espy, Hoy King Toy) seem to peg them as refugees from Thomas Pynchon's Central Casting. Their inevitable behavior - alternately cerebral and cloacal - confirms the identification...