Word: salesman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...invitation" is the soul of a revival meeting. All that precedes it is aimed at the moment when the preacher asks the audience to "come forward" and accept Jesus. It is the event's punch line, its consummation: if a preacher is a salesman, it is the clinching handshake; if he is a fisherman, it is the taking in of the net. Billy Graham's nets were always filled to breaking. In 1983 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Franklin Graham's net was empty...
Jerry Lundegaard (Willaim H. Macy) is a car salesman in trouble and in debt. As his wealthy father in-law won't knowingly help, Jerry decides to kidnap the in-law's daughter, his own wife. He expects the ransom money will solve most of his problems. This twisted idea is emblematic of the moral decay that contaminates many characters in "Fargo...
DIED. MARTIN BALSAM, 76, actor; in Rome. Born in the Bronx in New York City, the son of a sportswear salesman, Balsam went from the career-minting Actors Studio to live '50s TV to the movies, where he became a star portraying men who would never be stars. He was an uncertain juror in Twelve Angry Men (1957); a doomed detective in Psycho (1960); a Navy doctor utterly at sea in the moral morass of the nuclear age in The Bedford Incident (1965); and a hardworking family man at odds with his unreliable brother in A Thousand Clowns...
...American dream and the working class are still an affecting source of drama; Sam Shepard and David Mamet are proof. But Death of a Salesman, with its focus on idealism, fails to address the core concerns of an increasingly skeptical world that has already learned from Willy's lesson. Idealism is not a universal frailty like Othello's jealousy or Hamlet's indecision, but a transient societal attitude, and one that is not pervasive today. Those who do not agree will probably enjoy the show...
Despite superb performances from two of the show's main actors, this production of Death of a Salesman depends on an American idealism that is presently in its deathbed. Only the revival of that consciousness can produce a successful revival of the play...