Word: skinners
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...play commences with corpses of Lily (Jennifer Divine), Skinner (Roger Gould), and Michael (Paolo Carozza) being carried off the stage. The focus changes quickly. We are plunged into the tribunal hearings to determine the facts of the deaths. The inquiry lasts throughout the play, but the proceedings are punctuated by flashbacks and seemingly irrelevant commentary by unrelated characters such as an American sociologist, newspapermen, and visitors to a bar. This technique, the appearance of outside characters, usually succeeds in providing external perspectives on the tragedy, but the patchwork of a plot often slacks off as characters go off onto unnecessary...
...third character does not believe in anything. He has lost his belief in fairness through his aimless passage through life. Roger Gould's Skinner has the acquired cynicism of a man fighting an up-hill battle. Gould captures the role perfectly, embodying the character with a disarming insolence. His comic timing is marvelous...
Personal Best traces a few years in the lives of Tory skinner and Chris Cahill (Donnelly and Hemingway), two track athletes who fall in love when they meet during a downswing in Chris's career. As the women fight and make love with a cool intensity rarely captured on film. Chris (the younger of the two) breaks out of her slump and comes into her own as a runner and hurdler. She even joins Tory's team, after the established track star pleads with her coach to give Chris a chance...
...general public in on the fact that women athletes can be just as nastily competitive and talk just as dirty in shower and sauna as their male counterparts. As for the movie's centering on a pair of pentathletes, Chris Cahill (Mariel Hemingway) and Tory Skinner (Patrice Donnelly), who have not just a sweetly ambiguous lesbian encounter but a fullscale, move-in, move-out relationship-well, there goes what's left of the old image. Even if Chris finally leaves for a man, it is too late, the harm has been done...
...basis of their exceptional promise, not their past work. Today, members of that first set of fellows have gone on to become the Putnam Professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics, Garrett Birkhoff; the Pierce Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Willard V.O. Quine; and the Pierce Professor Emeritus of Psychology, B.F. Skinner...