Word: puritans
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...arch toymaker's instinct that produced the streamlined gadgetry of late art deco, the Day-Glo plastics of Pop, the high-tech doodads and joke furniture of today. The other is a reformist urge. When not fashioning playthings, designers turn grave, producing furniture and other objects that are neo- Puritan, high-minded. The severe geometries of Frank Lloyd Wright's turn- of- the-century interiors and Steven Holl's beautiful side chair (1984), for example, can have an almost oppressive sobriety. As playfulness alternates with the more austere, missionary vision, the American cultural personality seems like a preacher's child...
...Boston area can be deceiving. Like most first-time travelers here, you may think the only things these people care about is maintaining the Puritan ethic and polishing monuments of guys who killed Brits more than 200 years...
After a brief prologue--nasty, brutish, and short--we find ourselves in Stockton. Massachusetts in 1692, "at the height of the Puritan witch craze." Protagonist Nicholas Flatford (Jeff Rosen), a Puritan with a taste for sentiment and his own bad poetry, has just been given an ultimatum by Martha Coftin (Debra Staniunas), his something-more-than-shrewish wife: five days to clean up his act and cut out the poetry, or else. A reasonable request. "Can't you talk of something else besides the weather, vegetables, and domestic animals?" Nicholas demands, as he proceeds to undertake this task with twice...
...turn dethroned underhandedly by none other than the secretly depraved Prudence. At this point occurs the long-anticipated "surprise ending"--not much of an ending and even less of a surprise: the tables are turned through a climactic game of blackjack (at least it isn't trivial Puritan), in which the Devil is foiled by none other than the Narrator (Fred Pletcher), who has remained a grotesquely audible and visible presence since the beginning of the prologue. But there's more: the Narrator, reveals himself, much to chenagrin--"I'm the author of this play, he proclaims with inexplicable arrogance...
LONG BEFORE Harvard Law School was even a twinkle in some Puritan's eye, Shakespeare wrote, "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers...