Word: ritualization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...texture of an ethnic subculture. Director Francis Ford Coppola knows his subject so well that he imparts an almost visceral understanding that does not permit easy judgments. Coppola gets it all down, and gets it right: the Don dancing proudly with his daughter on her wedding day; the informal ritual of family dinner, and the whole preoccupation with food. Even the dialogue has the unmistakable cadence of the street, as when a Corleone lieutenant describes an untraceable revolver as "cold as they come." The characters become neither stock villains nor national stereotypes, because Coppola has set them in a world...
...Hawk's Well begins just before young Cuchulain's first meeting with Aoife. The play is done partly in the style of the Japanese Noh drama, a form that intrigued Yeats for its simplicity and ritual: it begins with the ceremonous unfolding and folding of a large cloth, a less mechanical and more suggestive device than a curtain for marking the division between the presence of actors and the progress of a play. William Barnum's slow and deliberate opening mime as the Old Man at the elusive fountain of immortality does more to set the scene than the other...
Except for a general looseness in its first act, this is the only major flaw in Indians, which usually manages to maintain a high level of dramatic tension from beginning to end. Some scenes, like the self-mutilation in the Sundance, a sacred Indian ritual which Cody used for entertainment in his Wild West Show, have a deep visceral impact. Scott's Indians despite its inherent flaws is an inventive, well-directed, moving evening of theater which should help dispel the image of the American Indian as a cigar store ornament...
Subtlety isn't one of the play's virtues. Christie's killer sticks closely to the execution scheme that the "Ten Little Indians" poem suggests--which he conveniently displays next to the fireplace. After each ritual murder someone is sure to pipe up, "Oh, that method fits here!" The sexually repressed spinster, the swaggering man of adventure, and the sweet-young-thing secretary are just three of the ten cliches who populate the island. And it happens, of course, on a dark and stormy night...
...where some 800 students are currently enrolled in 18 different women's studies courses, notes that the men in such classes have developed a new style of behavior. "They are much more open on an emotional level," he says, "and they aren't as involved in the ritual struggle for dominance. The movement demands that they become more human, less rational and more in touch with their feelings, that they discover women as people...