Word: smokes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...many scientists feel that the metric system should not be based on an arbitrary length, but upon some length taken from nature itself. Then, if all the meter bars were destroyed (by atomic war, for instance), the standard could be reestablished, as good as ever, when the radioactive smoke had cleared away...
When Brookhaven's pile begins to work, radioactive gases will be released, like the smoke, from the top of a tall stack. Since gas behaves about the same as smoke, the scientists will figure out in advance how to operate their pile safely-and how to keep its radioactive gases out of Long Island society...
Summer and Smoke (by Tennessee Williams; produced by Margo Jones) is all too plainly-but not too happily-by the author of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. What stamps, and sometimes rubber-stamps, it as his is the nature of the story and the style of the storytelling; far too often missing is the talent of the storyteller...
Whatever its resemblances to Williams' other plays, the play he meant to write in Slimmer and Smoke is easy to approve of. The only trouble is, he has not written it. It remains only a lucid diagram. Summer and Smoke has moments of sad, sharp insight, but little coherence and intensity as a whole. The reason is partly structural. In none of his plays has Tennessee Williams made a classic frontal assault on drama. Writing episodically, with tricks of stagecraft and a crutchlike use of offstage music, he has always trusted to a vague sense of poetry...
Summer and Smoke has one very genuine virtue: Margaret Phillips' performance as Alma. Condemned to talk like a book throughout, Miss Phillips reveals an unfailing ear for rhythm, an unfaltering instinct for character...