Word: randomed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Daniel Yankelovich, a student of the American psyche and chairman of the polling firm of Yankelovich, Skelly & White, now offers a more benign view. In New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down (Random House; $15.95), he suggests that this social upheaval may turn out to be as important as the cultural and political revolution that created the nation. Yankelovich recognizes that selfishness often masquerades as "self-actualization" and that "nothing has subverted self-fulfillment more thoroughly than self-indulgence." But borrowing from Alfred North Whitehead, he notes that "great ideas of ten enter reality...
...culture of the earth." Now he had the chance to prove it, every morning after breakfast. Dinner, served at 4, constituted the social hour. The patriot gathered his clan about him: his daughter Martha, who ran the household, plus a varying assortment of twelve grandchildren, as well as random aunts, sons-in-law and omnipresent house guests...
...just the qualities Shepard exhibits. When he tips to one side, he's our best playwright and he has the ability to short circuit the intellect with all the subtlety of a file on the teeth. When he tips in the other direction, his short circuits more resemble the random firing of brain synapses and he is in danger, as Tom McGuane says of "being trapped in a globe of his own hallucinatory despair." It's a precarious balancing act, and one which makes Shepard so much more a playwright than a writer of plays. Reading a Shepard script...
...composition have rocketed him so far into the stratosphere that he can barely exist on the mere surface of the planet anymore. Two detectives, Louis (Christopher Randolph) and Pablo (Christian Clemenson) come in out of the mainstream and attempt to reconstruct the crime. What follows is a collage of random psychic violence and free association, philosophy and claptrap, all so intricately conceived that to follow it in any sort of literary sense is ridiculous. They talk about Shepard writing in dream language, and the bearded wunderkinds at NYU write introductions to his plays that speak of ritual Indian drug...
...this is where the play is at its most beautiful. Memory and random images are Shepard's vocabulary and they are used to striking effect as vignette after vignette comes across--from Laureen a meditation on time and appearance, and one of the most haunting speeches Shepard has ever written (which is unfortunately undermined by the music.) Niles and Paulette wander through the music and madness, acting out a ritual exorcism of his personalities, Pable and Louis find themselves sucked further and further in. You can drive a truck twixt the shadow and the reality, Shepard seems to be saying...