Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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David Wheeler's direction efficiently transfers Hauptman's work from script to stage with all its virtues and vices intact. Only a jarring transition from city to desert, towards the end of Act I, jars the airy feel of play, set designer Karen Schulz wins low-key kudos for her subtle desert bachelor's pad, and the dry desert backdrops...
Wheeler wisely cast actors strong on the comic aspect. John Bottoms moves smoothly from Roy Orbison raptures to sputtering outrage to weary depression; he can't quite bring off the tender pathos written into the script, but few could do any better. Stehlin turns a stock soap opera part (the idealistic male ingenue) into a combination of Matthew Broderick and Woody Allen acting out a Roy Rogers fantasy; he suffers worst from the capricious plotting, and can't expand his stage presence into a full three dimensions...
...expect fried rice with your Chinese dinner, and you expect certain things, like a belching scene, in your teenage comedy," says Jeff Kanew, director of Revenge of the Nerds and the upcoming Gotcha! "They're basically about guys trying to get laid. When I became involved with Nerds, the script already had a party scene, a peekaboo scene, a panty raid, a food fight, a beer-guzzling contest. The studio's instruction to me was, 'Give us Animal House.' I gave it to them but tried to layer it with some humanity and real characters. I didn't think anything...
...author throws away his script and improvises a coruscating sermon. Celebrities become the graven images of this slack age, and on their well-coiffed, carefully blow-dried heads he calls down fire and brimstone. Others have drawn up the formal indictment against the cult of celebrities. Schickel offers a white-hot jeremiad. In idolizing and loathing the celebrities we conspire to create, we bury real humanity. Woe unto the celebrities whom we are so good at killing, he warns, and woe unto us. Is there an answer to this sorry circle of fame and deceit? Schickel's conclusion: "Resistance," holding...
...another showdown looms, White House aides acknowledge that they are in deep trouble in their drive to persuade Congress to provide $14 million in aid to the Nicaraguan contras. Their script calls for the President to go all out for the contras, whom he has dubbed freedom fighters, in the same way he did for the MX. "It's tough," said one aide. Then referring to the MX vote, he added, "But so was this. Go back and look where we were ten weeks ago on this...