Word: stage
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...book as an act or a routine is that it is only as good as its last bit. Despite Roth's extravagant comic talents and ingenuity, Portnoy's Complaint flags in stretches. The ending is a boisterious but somewhat flatfooted way of getting Portnoy off the stage. On balance, however, Portnoy's Complaint is skillfully paced, eliciting more laughs per page than any novel in recent memory-Catch-22 and The Sot Weed Factor notwithstanding...
...graduate student. The central question of the novel presages the issue that confronts Portnoy, only in reverse: Can one really let go of the self, renounce personal gratification for the sake of others? In Manhattan, Roth plunged into psychoanalysis, wrote a play that never got past the workshop stage, often retired to the writers' colony at Yaddo, a verdant estate in Saratoga Springs...
...Captain's Daughter, Pushkin fashioned a new native style-spare, exact, free of rhetorical flourish-which set the tone for the epic prose era that was to follow, from Gogol to Chekhov. In rich, full-blooded dramas like Boris Gudunov, he helped to free the Russian stage from its prim, Racine-engendered formalities. Poems like Ruslan and Liudmila, Memory and The Bronze Horseman grandly exploded the prevailing notion of the day that poetry should be either didactic or sentimental. "Good lord," said Pushkin impatiently, "the aim of poetry is poetry...
...FIRST breath of the play the stained glass windows light up, eerie and striking, their patterns pop, untrite and yet faithful to the spirit of the cathedral and religious scenes that one has come to expect from the medium. The stage is floor level, jutting on three sides into the audience and consisting of szthe skeleton outline of a large ancient building, the Priory Hall. Inside is a table set for dinner. This arrangement provides half the distance of the conventional stage and half the closeness of modern experimental theater, which is appropriate for a play that is largely static...
...roam around freely in this open space, and you can't see them sometimes because your view is blocked by the pillars of the bare structure of the building, but all this interference just helps to reinforce the audience's feeling of being eavesdroppers on the intense interaction on stage...