Word: satanizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Tynan's indictment of the play itself was forcefully seconded in The Village Voice by Jerry Tallmer, who added a few salvos of his own. Said he, "It is, in the kindest of all possible considerations, a big windy non-drama about God, Satan, and Job retold rather in the manner of such movies as Since You Went Away and The Best Years of Our Lives," and "written in what is also a sort of Hollywood verse." His reaction to the production, furthermore, was only lukewarm. Henry Hewes (Saturday Review) dismissed J.B. as "just an inconclusive effort...
...also a restatement of it, and, in a double sense, it is a theater piece. The action takes place inside a night-lit circus tent where a sideshow Job has been performing. Two out-of-work actors, Mr. Zuss and Nickles, toy with the Biblical masks of God and Satan they find lying around, and try speaking the roles. Suddenly they are aware of a voice from outside them, are caught up in a story near at hand...
...successful business man married to a pretty wife, father of four children and president of a bank, endowed with all the material blessings our time can bestow. And he is a "good and loyal servant" to the God who tempts him in response to the taunts of Satan. His children die by accident, war and murder; his home and his bank are destroyed; his wife leaves him; and he is reduced ultimately to a skin sack of boils and a collection of rags...
Hingle (as J.B.), Raymond Massey as Mr. Zuss (the balloon salesman who plays God), Nan Martin as J.B.'s wife, and Christopher Plummer as Nickels (the popcorn vendor who portrays Satan) are all excellent. Boris Aronson's set is magnificent; Miss Ballard's costumes catch the proper blend of the gaudy and grotesque; David Amram's music and Tharon Musser's lighting lend almost surrealistic overtones to the drama. And Kazan ringmasters his menagerie with the genius which has earned him his reputation...
When Clive Staples Lewis, 59, England's top amateur theologian, reread the psalms, he was bothered by the cursing. In 109, for instance, the psalmist prays that an ungodly man may rule over his enemy and that Satan may stand at his right hand, that his enemy's ""prayers be turned into sin," that the enemy's days be few and his job be given to someone else, that when he is dead his orphans be beggars, that no one should pity him, and that God always remember against him the sins of his parents. Even more...