Word: spite
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years he appeared in more than 180 stage productions, 62 movies and at least a score of TV plays. Through his early years he was the middle-class Everyman, shuffling toward archetype with good will and capacious common sense. But as he aged, his characters turned imperious and, in spite of their power, ineffectual. In David Storey's Home (1970), John Osborne's West of Suez (1971) and Harold Pinter's No Man's Land (1975) and in the films The Heiress (1950) and Long Day's Journey into Night (1962), Richardson found his ideal role: as the haughty burgher...
...deplorable that Idaho Senator James McClure, the chairman of the committee which has jurisdiction over the Interior Department, anticipates no difficulty in confirming the Secretary, in spite of Clark's record and his profound inexperience. The Senate almost never exercises its veto power over appointments, but Clark's nomination is the perfect opportunity. The committee should take Percy's words to heart, even more specifically than they were meant, and never again accept Clark while turning a blind eye to his ignorance...
Much of what keeps the audience laughing--in spite of a lukewarm first act--is simply the outrageous, if implausible, predicaments each of the characters finds herself in. Babe (Cyd Quilling) the youngest, is guilty of shooting her husband because she didn't like his looks. Lenny (Caryn West), the eldest, feels incapable of consummating a relationship with a man because one of her ovaries is missing. Doc Porter (Tom Stechschulte), the debonair neighbor, suffers from a limp as a result of his roof caving in. The bizarre nature of the situation--bordering on the absurd--would make any audience...
...basic problem is predictability. In an effort to constantly remind the audience that this play is a comedy in spite of serious themes, director James Pentecost creates an array of comic types rather than individuals. Lenny, for example, try convince us that she is old and that life is passing her by, repeatedly draws out each of her lines, but the result seems more like a six-year-old whining. Pentecost also tries to make Babe appear naively infantile. But what emerges instead is simply a ridiculous airhead who becomes not only unconvincing but predictable...
...most fearsome of these creatures were carnivores, like the ferocious Tyrannosaurus, which seems to have feasted on its fellow dinosaurs. Others, like the long-necked Brontosaurus, the archetypal dinosaur of cartoons, were gentle, browsing vegetarians. In spite of their comparatively small brains, dinosaurs were not dumb, floundering brutes. Deinonychus, for instance, was a fleet, two-footed creature with scimitar-like claws on its hind legs, grasping hands and dagger-sharp teeth. It apparently hunted in packs, in the manner of wolves. Stegoceras perhaps employed the thick dome on its skull in sexual combat, as an elk uses its horns. Dinosaurs...