Word: roe
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Rehnquist was one of two dissenters (the other: Byron White) from Roe vs. Wade, the court's 1973 decision creating a constitutional right to abortion, and he has repeatedly dissented from court decisions banning prayer in schools. Court decisions upholding affirmative action have regularly drawn his scornful dissents. "There is perhaps no device more destructive to the notion of equality than the . . . quota," Rehnquist wrote in United Steelworkers and Kaiser Aluminum vs. Weber in 1979. He adamantly opposes court-ordered busing to remedy school segregation. The Constitution, he wrote in a dissent from a 1979 decision upholding busing in Columbus...
...only he seems to hit the wrong parts, at least for this production. Blessed with a cast stronger in comic than tragic talents, Backus unwisely cuts the hilarious first act and plays down much of the humor in favor of the tragic, or in this case, bathetic parts. Alex Roe's Cyrano is the major casualty of this approach, though, to be fair, some of his wounds are self-inflicted. He seems to drone endlessly, eyes glazed and fingers fidgeting, in a voice that ought to earn him the name Cyrano de Sinusitus. But once he's roused from this...
...Cyrano's nose. This may be splitting nose hairs, as it were, but Cyrano's shnozz is so prominent, both visually and symbolically, that its obvious artificiality detracts mightily from the atmosphere of the play. Not only was the seam obvious from my fourth row seat, but it made Roe sound like an extra in a Dristan commercial. During one of the more tedious sections, I started to hope that the nose would fall off and add some needed comic relief, but it never did--another disappointment in a production that never delivers on its obviously enormous potential...
Abandoning "feminism" makes it too easy to abandon what the word stands for. If we grow afraid to stand up for women's rights for fear of being branded "feminist," we endanger those rights themselves. In 1986, a referendum will be held in Massachusetts to outlaw abortions if the Roe v. Wade decision falls, and to cut government funding for abortions for poor women. The revolution is not over--if it was a revolution...
...slapstick movements aren't the only inexplicable sight gags. The matter of a male (Alexander Roe) in the female role of Mrs. Mallarkey is more than just sexually dubious. It doesn't detract from the production, but it doesn't seem to add anything either. We've all seen this trick too many times at the Pudding to be amused merely by sexual ambiguity...