Word: rueful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Joanna Pacula's friends among Warsaw's actors and directors know, of course, that she won't be back. There is a rueful quality to their recollections as they describe Desdemona in jeans and a sweater, a bruised angel with, as the speaker is likely to add, a will of granite...
...Middle Ages, like A.R. Gurney Jr.'s other plays about the declining Protestant elite (Scenes from American Life, the current off-Broadway hit The Dining Room), is a wistful, elegiac comedy that preserves a tight-lipped emotional reserve: confrontations that could be tragic are played for rueful laughter. Unlike most of Gurney's other plays, however, The Middle Ages has a well-knit, symmetrical plot. It offers two love stories, a star-crossed one between a clownish boy and the girl who occasionally impels him to grow up, and another, almost accidental, between the boy's father...
...Marcel Marceau, making his first Manhattan appearance since 1975, does not speak. He is Everyman, and his stage is Everywhere. He mimes timeless little stories, occasionally tinged with rueful reflections of contemporary life. He calls a dating service in search of a companion, and is sent a dozen of them, so diversely demanding that he flees his home...
...combined three basic elements: Chekhovian sensibility, with that playwright's rueful portrait of the hero as antihero; the Freudian irrational unconscious, with the wayward id buffeting the will-less ego; and the romantic temperament, which Classicist Gilbert Murray called "the glorification of passion - any passion-just because it is violent, overwhelming, unreasonable...
...side of his nature and becoming a better man because of the experience, it triumphantly remains a farce for our times, not a tract for them. Despite the many creative hands involved, the picture has perfect comic tonality. It plays as if it were written by one wise and rueful individual, directed by someone who never felt a moment's anxiety...