Word: rustication
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There's a slant to the door in Bob Crowley's set for The Cripple of Inishmaan, Martin McDonagh's play at the Royal National's Lyttelton Theatre, that might suggest rustic simplicity or rustic imprecision or perhaps the way in which even the most robust structures can shift and settle with time. It's not that the door doesn't work perfectly well, opening and closing to let in and out characters like Johnnypateenmike, the village gossip, and Billy Claven, the eponymous hero, who wants Babbybobby the ferryman to sail him over to the next island where the great...
...blanch the irony out of St. Paul's question "O Death, where is thy sting?" Death comes in several varieties. It can be incongruously vibrant like "Yellow Mama," the electric chair in Alabama used last week for the execution of ex-Klansman Henry Hays. Or death can have the rustic decrepitude of the gallows in Delaware, which remains in operation. But on every chamber hang the words inscribed in Dante's Inferno: "Abandon all hope you who enter here...
When the curtain went up on the Boston Lyric Opera's "L'Elisir d'Amore," everyone was amazed. The lighting evoked Bellini's "The Feast of the Gods," or the video to "Losing My Religion." Aggressively rustic patchwork dresses and apple baskets, along with a frail red wooden ladder, made certain that this Donizetti comedy would not suffer from any absurd modern setting. The simple but handsome picture frame around the luscious stage set was a perfect touch. Anything so beautiful as all this, one thought, promises to be entertaining...
...problem: so often, the natives didn't know who these people really were, or treat them with the deference they felt they had earned. In one of the excellent catalog essays for "Exiles and Emigres," the writer Lawrence Weschler compares their idea of themselves to "Roman nobility in the rustic provinces...as stubbornly patronizing and aloof as the locals were sometimes naive and gauche." The dachshund story sums them up--as it does the situation of most exiles in America in the late 1930s and '40s. Two dachshunds meet on the palisade in Santa Monica, California, and schmooze about their...
...patter and the physical burlesque of the Renaissance clown with an ease, energy and good humor that's little short of astonishing. In the great Shakespearean tradition, Erik Amblad '98 dashes in and out of three different roles and is scenestealingly hilarious in the tiny part of the bumpkin rustic, Corin. Chuck O'Toole '97 plays Orlando's usurping elder brother Oliver as a marvelously villainous fop in the first act, although his performance wavers toward the end of the play with his character's transformation into a repentant lover. And Scott Brown '98 and Lucia Brawley '99 are delightful...