Word: sermonic
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Charles Laughton has done a rare thing--he has taken George Bernard Shaw seriously. Instead of trying to pretend that Shaw is a clever buffoon and that Major Barbara is a drawing-room farce with some incidental ideas, Laughton has staged the play as the impassioned sermon which it really is. His actors therefore do not bounce about the stage, they stand still whenever possible, and frequently they stand facing the audience directly. To make sure that the audience--next to the playwright himself, the most important character in a Shavian drama--is drawn right into the action, he cleverly...
...play is a sermon, however, it preaches by demonstrating. Just as Shaw himself debates with the audience, so the play's principal character, Andrew Undershaft, engages in a series of verbal duels with the rest of the cast. Laughton and his designer, Donald Oenslager, chose to underline this element of Shaw's way of constructing the play by making the main feature of the set two identical benches, placed on opposite sides of the stage and remaining fixed even when the scene shifts to a different location. Laughton, playing the part of Undershaft, almost invariably sits on or stands near...
...amount raised to found the college, to its present finaincial value of $36,000,000, of which half is in endowment. Most Tufts men are familiar with the story of how its original funds were raised. At a Universalist convention in New York the Reverend Ballou preached the sermon to open the convention on the forty-eighth verse of the twelfth chapter of Luke: "Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required; and to whom men have committed much, of them will they ask the more...
...tiny (pop. 550) Tioga, Texas, early in the month, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, 74, became a formal church member for the first time when he joined Lone Star Primitive Baptist Church.* The conversion took place in a white frame church, after a Sunday sermon, when Elder Henry Greer Ball, a grocer on weekdays, asked if anyone present would like to accept Jesus Christ. Up stepped Sam, taking off tie, jacket and shoes. Then, wearing socks, trousers and white shirt, the Speaker of the House was completely immersed for a moment in a portable baptistry before he emerged dripping...
...continue doing so, for the simple reason that clean sheets were virtually unknown in 15th century England -which had reached about the same stage of political ethics as Russia is enjoying today. Lord Protector Richard arrested and executed his brother's advisers. Conveniently, a friar preached a sermon on the ominous text: "Bastard slips shall not take root," whereupon Richard declared his brother's children illegitimate, and took the throne himself. For a short time, the little prince and his brother were seen by passers-by "shooting at butts ... on the Tower greens." Then they disappeared. Atween...