Word: spoofed
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...performers. Actors (23 of em shuffle, awkwardly in huge packs on and off the stage toting Peanuts-style two-dimensional trees for the nature scenes and a dissipated desk and chair, which indicate action indoors. Dialogue drones endlessly, and the only truly witty exchange is a throwaway Samuel Beckett spoof, "Waiting for the Dough" though it's unclear how this two-minute diversion worked its way into the larger plot...
...Lengthy erotic descriptions tend to become postcoital arias. But Har rison scores well on the firing range: his humor usually strikes in the killing zone. Dashiell Hammett's low-rent realism made the mystery novel fun to read. War lock demonstrates that it is equally enjoy able to spoof...
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...
...course not everything works. Several obvious jokes are beaten laboriously into submission, particularly in the articles on a fat chef, a "liberated" inflatable lady and the Shah in hell. A promising spoof of those insipid People interviews ends drearily when the same joke--the interviewer not recognizing his subject's newsworthy statements--dies from repetition. The parody also slips up in the celebrity department. Probably because it concentrates on the briefly famous folks in People, it never captures the unique flavor of People's celebrity profiles; the parody doesn't look at the amusing laundry list--current success, difficult childhood...
People magazine cooperated with the Lampoon in the spoof project, as did the celebrities who appear in the issue...