Word: shebeens
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...interloping "playboy" is not, as might be expected, a muscle-brained stud of the William Inge school, but a shy young man who is quite surprised to discover that by splitting open his father's head he has became a hero to everyone within miles of the Flaherty shebeen. "It's great luck and company I've won me in the end of time," he says, "--two fine women fighting for the likes of me--till I'm thinking this night wasn't I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in the years gone...
...musical Playboy, retitled The Heart's a Wonder, is pure Synge: the rollicking story of Christy Mahon, the peasant boy who became a hero by telling a tale of parricide. The scene is still Michael James Flaherty's peat-smoked shebeen (pub), and the rich poetic dialogue is still, as Synge said a good play must be, "as fully flavored as a nut or apple." For music the O'Farrell sisters borrowed Irish ballads. As for the lyrics, they did a remarkable job of bending Synge's own lifelike speech into rhyme...
Author Gordimer, a Johanne burger herself, tours this world of racial strangers with easy accuracy. When she describes a party, white or mixed, a hunting trip, or an illicit visit to a colored shebeen (speakeasy), there is always a byproduct of insights into what is meant by every word or act. When she has finished with Toby Hood, he is a changed man. Any reader who shares Toby's indifference may feel at least the beginnings of a similar change of heart...
Meier kept a shebeen in Leningrad until political misfortune befell...