Word: slapstick
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that Goldthwait's material is totally subliterate raving. In his latest HBO concert, Share the Warmth, he offered pungent comments on everything from Iranscam to Lucille Ball ("A 75-year-old woman performing slapstick comedy -- is that funny to you?"), along with hapless autobiographical asides. "I lost my job," he whimpers. "No, wait. I didn't really lose my job. I mean, I know where my job is still. It's just when I go there, there's this new guy doing it." Underneath the shrieks and stammers, a shrewd comic mind is percolating...
Miraculously, this veritable carnival manages to fit into the confines of the Quincy House Cage, a storage cubicle in the bowels of New Quincy. The actors use the space's claustrophobic confines to their advantage, colliding with each other as the slapstick humor requires...
...private self and his father (Jamie McInnes) work secretly together to provide continue slapstick comedy. During afternoon tea, Gar predicts every word the elder O'Donnell speaks. When the old man describes his problems with travelling (his bowels cease to function), the unseen alter ego screams "bound by the ass, tethered by the toilet" to the delight of the audience...
...absolve themselves of sin by the very act of conquest. He repeatedly urges himself to be a Napoleon -- which, Lyubimov acknowledges, Soviet audiences often took to mean a Stalin. These philosophical monologues, however, are kept brief. Lyubimov relies heavily on ritual and brief blackout skits that verge on surreal slapstick; he creates a milieu more than he mounts a debate. Like a cinematic montage, the story jumps from Raskolnikov to his family, his destitute neighbors, a deranged friend caught in a suicidal religious ecstasy and, occasionally, the inquisitor who seeks to extract Raskolnikov's confession. This structure is meant...
...native Russian. But Adapter Michael Frayn has achieved the satisfying illusion of one in Wild Honey, a dizzyingly funny romantic farce culled from Chekhov's untitled, and by most estimates unproducible, first extant play. Frayn is best known in the U.S. as the playwright of Noises Off, a slapstick send-up of British sex comedy, and Benefactors, a regretful recollection of the relations between two young professional couples. Wild Honey marries the wry and the rowdy strains in Frayn's writing and at the same time prefigures Chekhov's later plays, notably The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya and The Seagull...