Word: reddin
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LIFE DURING WARTIME. A stern 16th century John Calvin provides a running commentary in Keith Reddin's wacky melodrama-cum-farce about home-security salesmen who double as burglars. At San Diego's La Jolla Playhouse...
...agonies and ecstasies of family life but has faltered at portraying the broad sweep of public life; its ambitions have been toward emotional, not intellectual, riches. Thus two new plays appearing in metropolitan San Diego would be noteworthy for their reach, whatever their merits. But what Keith Reddin, 34, aspires to in Life During Wartime and Lee Blessing, 40, aims at in Cobb proves in each case to be well within the writer's grasp...
...Reddin's play, at the La Jolla Playhouse, is much the more complicated of the two -- and certainly the wackier. Instead of a naturalistic kitchen-sink drama, this is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink melodrama-cum-farce, featuring fantasy sequences, flashbacks, ghosts, tall tales, quoted swatches of e.e. cummings verse and repeated incursions into a contemporary setting by a bearded and costumed Calvin. He recites his writings on predestination and free will and inveighs, sounding suspiciously like a televangelist, against the iniquities of Pop culture. The "war" of the title is not an event but a metaphor. It refers...
What fuses this apparent chaos into a coherent and haunting play is the theme that runs through all of Reddin's work, notably Rum and Coke (1985), Big Time (1987) and Nebraska (1989): the tandem dangers of run-amuck individualism and nice-guy uninvolvement. The central character in Life During Wartime is, like almost all of Reddin's heroes, a genial but morally weightless young man. When he learns that other salespeople in his home-security firm are running a sideline in burglary -- for the loot and to generate additional sales -- he assumes it has nothing to do with...
...show leaves one wishing that Reddin were less preoccupied with writing about people so lacking in self-awareness, so ethically dead that in a crisis they shrivel rather than change. By temperament he cuts himself off from straightforward plot development. His characters rarely grow and deepen, eliminating another avenue by which plays accumulate impact. Thus this fine writer produces works that stimulate the mind but do not linger in the heart...