Word: spasms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Parody is Christopher Durang's native element. He can mimic and spoof manners, trends and styles of speaking in ways that inflict the sting of truth just as surely as those of a good caricaturist. But Durang tends to end his plays unconvincingly, in a spasm of violence, as if he had been brooding on deeper things all along-like, say, man's fate. It is as if the playwright as jester suddenly dropped his mask and wished to be acknowledged as a thinker. These two one-acters at Manhattan's Playwrights Horizons Theater display both Durang...
Jean Rochefort has heretofore put his sheepish grin and Slinky-like gait into the service of boulevard comedy. Here he is both more powerful and more discreet, signaling the film's shifting moods with each new spasm of Gilles's anticipation and anguish. Delphine Seyrig, who plays his neighbor, the lovely, slow-witted Yvette, was once the very model of Marienbad chic. It is a pleasure to see those enigmatic eyes widen in what Yvette means to convey as delight, to see her smile squirm at Gilles's gentle ribaldry...
...backyard, Jackie Onassis was stung by the publication of her "Dearest Ros" letter to Roswell Gilpatric, which was said to have driven Ari to Callas behavior. Billie Jean King's recent revelations were due less to a spasm of candor than to more than 100 letters she wrote her secretary. So it goes, from post to pillory. Lee Marvin made legal history a few years back when he lost a "palimony" suit to Michelle Triola Marvin. One of his letters to Michelle closed: "Hey baby, hey baby, hey baby, hey baby, hey baby, hey baby." It proved that...
...year-old government of Prime Minister P.W. Botha, 65, has tried to make a beginning by limiting discriminatory practices like segregation at public facilities, lifting bans against mixed sports and recognizing some black trade unions. But even these tentative reforms have angered many whites and set off a spasm of soul searching over the future course of the country that provides so much chromium, manganese, platinum and vanadium, which are so valuable to the West. Says Journalist Tertius Myburgh: "It is no longer a question of whether Afrikanerdom will split politically. It has already split...
These are classic symptoms of a heart attack, or what doctors call a myocardial infarction. Such attacks occur all too frequently in the U.S., striking one American every 21 seconds. They can hit suddenly, without any obvious hint of previous disease, when coronary arteries pinch shut in a spasm. But they usually result from a lifelong buildup of fatty deposits in the arteries that nourish the heart. If these coronary vessels become badly obstructed, the flow of vital blood and oxygen is reduced or cut off entirely. When that happens, parts of the heart are starved. It is the death...