Word: spasm
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Along the way to Constantinople they find that Burton deBusch (James Hanes) is the mastermind behind SPAM's plot to fill the snuff boxes of the British with opium and blow away their entire navy. In the end, thanks to the efforts of O'Genick's fellow travelers, Spasm the Butler (Rich O'Leary) and Ella Mental (Doug Fitch), the scheme is thwarted. (Leavitt and Peirce's sales have dropped sharply since the show opened...
Hanes as Burton deBusch and O'Leary as Spasm are memorable in their roles. The latter, who portrays a classic professor-turned-butler, makes the most of his few lines and shows the difference between creating a character and just playing a part. You just can't take your eyes off O'Leary from the time when he steals the song "Domestic Blisters," to the end when he is fittingly left alone on stage...
...Great Leap Forward (1958-60), with its preposterous backyard pig-iron furnaces and bureaucratic romance of communal farms, left the country in depression and famine. Less than a decade later came the Cultural Revolution, a three-year Maoist spasm of revolutionary zeal against the onset of complacency and bureaucracy. The Cultural Revolution dislocated nearly every institution of Chinese life, many of which still have not recovered. A case can be made that Mao lived too long. The Great Revolutionary died at 82, an enfeebled puppet. His legacy, after the Cultural Revolution, was a ramshackle economy, a badly equipped military...
Earlier this fall I had occasion to note a mood of closure and withdrawal that seems to be growing around us. I sense more than the contraction and spasm of isolation that would inevitably follow a period as expansive as the sixties and an experience as searing as the war in Vietnam. This mood of disaffiliation has these roots and others as well and it casts a longer shadow. We are coming to the end of the twentieth century, and the knowledge we bear weighs heavy. Part of our knowledge is the realization that systems, technological and ideological, in which...
...kind of thing you will like. Michael Crichton, who directed Coma and wrote the screenplay, is a doctor, and so is Robin Cook, who wrote the novel from which the film was made, so presumably the two of them are not try ing to induce a nationwide spasm of hysterical loathing of the medical profession...