Word: sand
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...Theater has tried to crack all season. Joanne Hamlin plays the eternally-optimistic Winnie in what turns out to be a tour de force performance. Throughout the show Hamlin, who has about 95 per cent of all the spoken lines in the play, is buried in a mound of sand, and it is a wonder she can carry her own enthusiasm let alone Winnie's. Despite Hamlin's excellent job, the show is not all that exciting. 90-minute monologues, which is essentially what Beckett has to offer, are hard to make theatrically charging and this production at the Loeb...
Beckett's two-act play is a highly abstracted vision of existence and of an enduring human spirit. The major character is an aging and chatty woman named Winnie who is buried, first up to her waist and later up to her neck, in a mound of sand. In spite of her tortuous condition Winnie maintains a constant banter of praise for her life, always hitting upon one thing or another that is "wonderful" about her circumstances. Her day, the start of which is signaled by a mysterious bell, is begun with a prayer, almost too ironical, "to a world...
...almost the entirety of the play, Willie remains hidden behind Winnie's mound of sand--all that is to be seen of him is his bald head beneath a straw hat. But at the play's end, Willie, robbed of life's energy, makes a last ditch effort to make contact with his wife. In a most pitiful manner he crawls around to the front of the dune, only to be greeted by Winnie's cheerful, "My, what a pleasant surprise." The impropriety of his wife's politely jovial remark seems to do Willie in, while Winnie is left operating...
Good News. Social problems are the most intense in Rock Springs, a huge trove of coal, oil, shale, potash, sand, gravel, clay and cement rock. Since 1971, about 5,000 workers have moved in to build the giant Jim Bridger Power Plant- and work in a newly discovered oilfield. Another wave of outsiders, lured by the expansion of trona mines, a source of widely used sodium compounds, and the reopening of old coal mines, is expected to increase the town's 26,000 population...
...Crime Novelist Donald E. Westlake, musing in front of the tube a decade ago, that was no idle question. At the time, Westlake was known mainly as a promising heir to the tough, taut Hammett-Chandler tradition. But suddenly he glimpsed the comic potential of tossing the sand of petty frustrations and human fallibility into the well-oiled machinery of the thriller. Nonviolent, Runyonesque crooks could become the victims, and everyday life the culprit. Getaway cars could stall, crucial phone numbers could slip the mind, a paralyzing snowstorm could fall on the day of a planned bank heist...