Word: scene
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This is mostly because of the play's unique structure: twenty-one short scenes, "Simple Techniques for More Effective Communication," among which, out of sequence, are presented four events crucial to the "plot." These are revealed in a separate scene (brilliantly acted by Director Jonno Deily-Swearingen '98, as a Harvard prof) to be "TRYST," "WARNING," "THREAT," and "MURDER"--elements amounting to a predictable techno-thriller badly in need of satire, involving a boy genius (Chuck O'Toole '97), a spy (Paul Monteleoni '01), a democratic revolutionary (Jessica Shapiro '01) and several lunatics...
After this overture, one was struck by O'Toole's witty and well-timed delivery of a monologue about his boyhood intellectual prowess (calculating the trajectory and position of the airborne football instead of ducking). In a play full of paradox, the second scene, "The Banality of Evil," concludes smugly with gorgeous poetry...
Once this inner plot starts making sense (not, one could argue, until the "Diagram" in scene 14) it's fun to piece things together. But this task is often distracted into a fumbling account of the scores of #'s literary references. Some of these references are disjunct and capricious, but the best, like the Interlude of scene five, are masterpieces of intertextuality without being "coterie items. "Rising from trash cans borrowed from Beckett, Ezra Pound (Yu) and T.S. Eliot (Marler) offer up literature. In a later scene, Pound, with Robert Lowell, reflects that he "began with swollen head, and ended...
...emergence of Yu and Marler as themselves in the Cafe scene, which, since it veers down into meta-self-referentiality, might have been disgusting. They discuss the writing of # as well as other "weighty," matters, including all the "L.B."s (read:lbs.) in REM's "It's the End of End of the World As We Know...
These moments shed light on the whole play, and are far better than the Twins' turn at exegesis (Jorge Rodriguez and Ray Courtney, scene eleven), which came close to coherence. Another wacky moment in the that-almost-made-sense category was scene ten, "It Saw Charles Bernstein Suspended in a Shimmering Column of Light." Not only does this allow for surefire alien-abduction topos, but it gives Marler a chance to shine as he who laments the paucity of men who "can tell a parastatis from a syntagma...