Word: silent
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...tree. Other convicts served iced cakes, candies and jellies that a former bricklayer had made in the prison kitchen the day before. Guards, unarmed, strolled about in costumes too, but had nothing to worry about: convicts were on their honor. Near by, the African prisoners swung into a haunting Silent Night, And on the fringes of the crowd, snatching bits of paper streamers and begging slices of watermelon, were scores of ragged black children who had not been invited. "Next year," promised a prison warder as he watched them, "we'll make it a multiracial party...
...Silent Night, Lonely Night (by Robert Anderson) tells of two people in a New England inn on Christmas Eve. Strangers in adjacent rooms-Barbara Bel Geddes has a son in a prep-school infirmary near by, Henry Fonda a wife in a mental sanitarium up the hill-they come together out of loneliness, are at first trivially autobiographical, then more and more confidingly so. They have a drink with newlyweds, look back on marriage that has come to grief, resist pity and show twinges of self-pity, talk of love and resist sex. The woman, it turns...
...Country Bedroom, an evening-long unburdening of troubled hearts and sluicing of wistful memories. Much of it is honestly evocative and well expressed. A sensitive Henry Fonda and an appealing Barbara Bel Geddes do well by it. But beyond suffering crucially as a play from all lack of movement, Silent Night suffers equally as a conversation piece from overstretching a mood. That bedeviler of the mood piece, monotony, more and more scatters his poppies. Valid feeling comes more and more to seem watered or sugared...
Undramatic though the play is, the final trouble lies less with subject matter than with form. Had Silent Night been not a full play but a longish one-acter, it might have had a special appeal. It could, just long and lyrically enough, have chronicled a meeting and sustained a mood-and with no tossed-in newlyweds, no shaky final scene. Unfortunately, as a one-acter it would not fit the Broadway scheme of things, though as a full-length play it scarcely fits it either...
Johnson, the majority leader of the Senate, voted for recommittal last July, but was silent during debate; he is regarded as the key man on this issue in the Senate. Elder and others feel that Johnson, with pressure on one side from the President and on the other side from the Democratic Advisory Council, may be ready to support repeal. If Johnson tries for the Democratic Presidential nomination, a definite stand against the NDEA affidavit might help him to win Northern liberal voters...