Word: starkly
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...like an old coin from passing through the hands of so many directors. Although it's been 16 years since its original minting, this weekend's Dunster House performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hasn't lost its edge. The innovation of two Shakespearean anti-heroes on center stage, the stark contrast between Elizabethan and modern language--and the themes of the finality of death, the role of fate and the insignificance of human life--are not dulled even after many staging. Director Roger Kaplan's interpretation, while not radically different from others,' lands "heads up" with a lively presentation...
Another trap in Stoppard's play is the confining of rich, mock-Elizabethan dialogue to a spare, absurdist setting--as critics have pointed out, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern draws heavily from Samuel Beckett's style. But director Kaplan perhaps tips the scales too heavily toward the absurd tradition. The stark stage, the sparse furniture are all there, and rightly so. But the Shakespearean tradition is just as important: Stoppard includes sizable chunks from Hamlet, and his own words show a penchant for language tricks...
...frequent users. But the alarming fact is that most of the dead had not been especially reckless: two-thirds died after merely snorting coke?not after free-basing or shooting up?and, according to Wetli, "[none used] any more on the day they died than they had previously." A stark example came last week near Palm Beach, Fla. Socialite William Ylvisaker Jr., 27, died of respiratory failure after snorting cocaine late into the night. His friends insisted that Ylvisaker, a champion polo player and son of a Chicago electronics mogul, had not been a heavy user...
Montogomery, however, fully inhabits the richer characterization of Jackson. His initially laid-back approach and wry humor conceal the psychic turmoil beneath his surface. Against Michael Anania's stark, hospital-green set. Montgomery delivers Jackson's graphic descriptions of horrific war scenes in a voice which goes flat whenever his emotions threaten to take over. His face becomes an artistic canvas, simultaneously evoking the moral desolation of a Hopper cityscape and the pain of a Munch woodcut. His continual taking of breathmints suggests that nothing can serve as a palliative for getting the horrible taste out of his heart...
...Administration's major rearmament program and NATO's embattled effort to base nuclear missiles in Western Europe. So, as the 1984 defense budget heads toward a showdown in Congress and Deployment Day for Europe's new missiles approaches, the Pentagon last week once again emphasized in stark terms the menacing force the West must counter. "The facts are clear," warns a new Defense Department document. "The lengthening shadow of Soviet military power cannot be wished away or ignored...