Word: slab
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...SLAB BOYS by John Byrne...
That happy circumstance has befallen Slab Boys, a burst of bitter memory from Scottish Playwright John Byrne about the hopeless nights and dreamless days of young men who grind dyes in the "slab room" of a carpet factory near Glasgow. When first produced in New York, off-Broadway in 1980, the play seemed a programmatic denunciation of the social order, as personified by two pompous functionaries and by a blazered young prig who was passing through the slab room on his foreordained...
...themes of privation and sardonic defiance are conveyed at first glance. The set, designed by Playwright Byrne, is the slab room, dingy as a tenement, yet spattered with paint as cheerfully as a Jackson Pollock canvas. The only ornament is a poster of the slab boys' hero, the rebel without a cause, James Dean. Standing beneath it, a young man studiously paints a watch onto his wrist. He soon makes plain what the audience guesses: in this knockabout environment, even a watch is an unattainable badge of advancement...
Bunshaft's Lever House consisted of two glass slabs. A one-story horizontal slab, partly on stilts, is laid parallel to Park Avenue. A 24-story vertical slab intersects the horizontal one and faces East 54th Street. The openings under the stilts lead to an interior court. The building occupies only 25% of the permissible space, for dramatic effect and to let light into the offices...
...retrospect, Bunshaft's abstract sculpture reflects the anti-urban bias of the early modern movement. Its vertical slab interrupts the building line along East 54th Street. Such disruption is now considered detrimental to an orderly street pattern. And the court Bunshaft created is uninviting and mostly empty...