Word: puritanism
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...maybe Puritan Frost was merely reverting to form. The only son of a church-mouse-poor Methodist minister, he was at 17 a spellbinding lay evangelist. He preached love and practiced thrift. He still does. Almost uniquely among showfolk, Frost seldom has been known to throw tantrums. He is almost as solicitous toward employees as he is toward celebrities, and treats autograph hunters as tenderly as his audiences or his relatives. He is indiscriminately ingratiating. Not since Ed Sullivan has anyone on television back-patted, hugged and smooched so rapturously. His wide-eyed, basset-unctuous, hand-kneading style...
Sociologically, Playwright Eichman is most astute in suggesting that the transfer of power from the Boston "blue-bloods" to the Irish Catholic majority has actually accentuated New England's narrow puritan ethic. As Ned ("Scooter") Ryan, Dzundza viscerally endows the prosecuting attorney with the instincts of a fox in a hen coop. Always grave and commanding in presence, Earle Hyman has to wait to the end of the play to deliver the doctor's passion ate plea for the right of a woman to terminate her own pregnancy...
...scenes with Robert and his father ring true, the dialogue between Robert and Kate doesn't ring at all. The exchanges are cliched, wooden, alternately boring and unconvincing. Kate's parents are conservative, blame Robert for their daughter's "condition," and seem paralyzed by shock and Puritan indignation. As such, they are stereotypes, merely providing a field for Robert and his father to joust upon...
...takes three generations to make a lady, and then she'll spit," he used to say. In addition to many distinguished ancestors, Boeth can also claim a petticoat thief in New Amsterdam (fined 20 guilders for the deed). And Chicago Bureau Chief Benjamin Cate enjoys recalling, among his Puritan precursors, one William ("Whiskey") Cate, who earned his moniker as the watchdog of sobriety in colonial Boston. "During his lifetime, he confiscated many bottles of booze," says Cate. "When old Bill finally died, they found that all those hundreds of bottles were still in the basement-and all empty...
With a storyteller's gift for narrative and vivid detail, Lupo enlivens the somewhat familiar history of poor, brawling Irish immigrants invading the Boston of the 1800s and suffering harassment from the threatened Yankees. He readily accepts Henry Adams' description of the Puritan-descended New Englander, who "in his long struggle with a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to love the pleasure of hating; his joys were...