Word: sams
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...squirrel" imagery of the play literally, she skitters about the stage like a sandpiper. This does not destroy Nora's coquettishness, but it certainly diminishes it. There seems to be an arbitrary rhetoric of motions with which Ullmann plays the role. When she fears that her husband Torvald (Sam Waterston) will discover her secret dealings with the malignant moneylender Krogstadt (Barton Heyman), she makes the panicky gestures of a heroine in a silent-movie melodrama. When she reads the riot act to Torvald prior to slamming the famous door, she sits as motionless as a pillar of ice. Presumably...
...Sam's failure is that of the American politicians who spend months debating whether the price of gasoline would be fifty or seventy cents a gallon, and never hist at the revolution in consumption patterns that America needs in order to survive. For Sam's country to survive, people must accept sardinehood. And Sam accepts. He'll come back day after next to enter a petition for more time to write his departmental reports. He's found an outlet for his frustrations--"my petition for more time." Sure...
...ACTION in John Hersey's contribution to the "day-in-the-life" genre covers one hour of Sam's life in line. The rest of the puzzle comes through in Hersey's mastery of the flashback, and even more so in the mind-paragraphs he uses to separate recalled scenes from conversations with fellow petitioners...
Like a strobe light on someone dancing, the flashbacks present a jerky stop-and-start picture: there is Sam's wife, who hears the mouth-breathing of people sleeping and feels the eyes in the dark of the sleeping hall and can't make love: his daughter, who has adapted to her crowded world like a serene snowflake in a blizzard, whom he cannot understand; his father, being twisted and contorted and shook to death by Parkinson's disease; his mother, who believed that humanity was perfectible and gave herself to a life of committees for improvement, and cried when...
Hersey's human truth gives continuity to Sam's poses in the paragraphs of unspoken thoughts--brain-twinges that evoke corresponding tingles of recognition in the reader. For instance, the opaque petition window--presumably a one-way mirror--blocks sight...