Word: rimbaud
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...Chicago known to man. The central character, Shlink, a Malaysian lumber dealer, looks like an angular Dr. Fu Manchu. Shlink (Seth Allen) offers to buy a library clerk's opinion of a mystery thriller. The clerk, a romantic idealist named George Garga (Don Scardino), offers to sell Rimbaud's critique, but proudly announces that his own cannot be bought...
...breaks one's toe. Shlink, a wily masochist, turns over his lumber plant to Garga and thus entraps him. Garga must now buy and sell not only lumber but human beings. Shlink and Garga exchange fortunes, trying to out-toy fate. Unfortunately, Director David Jones understresses the Rimbaud-Verlaine love-hate homosexual bond, which is at the core of the drama. At play's end Shlink takes his own life with a vial of poison, and Garga moves to New York-an anambiguous ending if ever there...
Destiny left simple happiness out of the script in fashioning the relationship between the French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. One might say that Rimbaud wrote the major part of the script. Claiming that the poet's task is to be a seer, Rimbaud while still in his teens demanded "a long, immense and deliberate derangement of all the senses, the poet seeking every possible experience of love, pain and madness...
Absinthe is the catalyst. It turns Verlaine (David Markay) violent and makes Rimbaud (Nicky Silver) into a satanic enfant terrible. Transforming his mentor into his slave, Rimbaud pries Verlaine loose from his wife and son. The rest of their tempestuous saga is fairly accurately chronicled in the production at off-Broadway's La Mama Theater. The play is flawed, but it is amazing that British Playwright Hampton (The Philanthropist) wrote it when he was only 18. He was obviously drawn to Rimbaud as a fin-de-sicle spiv, and Silver plays him that way. Markay's Verlaine...
...remained a hip poetaster, a psychedelic pushcart salesman hawking Oedipal nightmares like Good Humors. No One Here Gets Out Alive portrays Morrison not as he was but in the image that he built. He died in Paris in 1971 at the age of 27, still playing Rimbaud the way a young actor cannot shake off a role even after he has lost the part...