Word: realisms
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Piano Lesson debuted more than a year ago at the Yale Repertory Theater, where Wilson has launched all his plays. In that production, the work seemed an intriguing but unpolished amalgam of kitchen-sink realism (there is literally one onstage) and window-rattling, curtain-swirling supernaturalism. Not much of the actual text has changed. But at the Goodman the play confidently shuttles spectators between the everyday present and the ghostly remnants of the past, until ultimately the two worlds collide. The first glimpse of the spookily poetic comes before a word is spoken, when a shaft of white light illumines...
With Matador (1986) and Law of Desire (1987), Almodovar displayed his brazen assurance of style and vaulted from comic realism to soap-operatic mannerism. Matador is a contemporary vampire story: an ex-bullfighter and a woman lawyer, believing that death is the ultimate climax, impale each victim on the cold steel of their lust. Law of Desire draws a bent triangle: a gay movie director, his transsexual sister (Maura) and her adopted child's rightful mother (played by a Spanish drag queen). Revelations of murder, incest, suicide and lotsa hot sex follow, but the tone remains knowing, tender. As Matador...
Bush's Lukewarm Welcome Though every new President gets something of a honeymoon with his constituency, George Bush's debut as Chief Executive will be marked more by cool realism than by warm affection. The TIME/CNN survey conducted by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman last week showed that the dearth of popular enthusiasm that dogged Campaign '88 has persisted. Now it focuses on Bush and Dan Quayle...
Without this battleship of an ego, Courbet would hardly have survived the attacks of the critics of his day. What was realism to his enemies? Atheism, socialism, materialism, crudity: a denial of all decent control. An audience that doted on the rococo peasant had insuperable difficulties with Courbet's frieze of worn faces and homespun black suits in Burial at Ornans, 1850. He painted, someone gibed, the way one waxed boots. He was seen as a dangerous socialist, a besmircher of the ideal, a bucolic thug from the Franche-Comte trampling all over the classical tradition with his wooden clogs...
...abiding passion for trenchant realism...