Word: rueful
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...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...
Then Nunn drew a remarkable admission from General Vessey. He asked whether the Joint Chiefs all supported Dense Pack. With a rueful half-smile, Vessey conceded that three of the five did not. That confirmed the rumor circulating in the House. Vessey, an Army general, later clearly implied that only he and Air Force Chief of Staff Charles A. Gabriel had favored going ahead with Dense Pack. Opposed to Dense Pack until there is greater technical evidence of its ability to survive a Soviet first strike were Army Chief of Staff Edward C. Meyer, Chief of Naval Operations James...
...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...