Word: statics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...rehabilitations. As styles change, men and periods slip into comparative obscurity, and a later age whisks them back into favor. So it has been to a large degree with the art of France in the 17th century-a century that for a long time seemed too staid and static for modern tastes. Since World War II, museums on both sides of the Atlantic have been fighting for the few surviving works of the 17th century master Georges de La Tour. Last summer, the Louvre put on the biggest exhibit of Nicolas Poussin ever held...
Poetry, as Archibald MacLeish sees it, is a little like a man who shuffles across a familiar rug and touches a doorknob, only to be pricked by an unexpected spark of static electricity. In that instant, two things happen. For one, the man "understands" electricity not as a textbook diagram, but as a felt experience "charged with meaning." For another, three disparate things-the man, the rug, the doorknob-have been fused with one of the cosmic forces. They have become, in MacLeish's view, links in the underlying order at the heart of the universe, which men instinctively...
...removing the Christmas legend from the tradition of sweetness and light, Orff had given all the good lines to the forces of darkness. When the witches were offstage, the hour-long pageant was static, lacked the exciting, full-blooded drama found in most of his work, including his Easter play, Comoedia de Christi Resurrectione. But the musical backgrounds were compelling, and the enthusiastic première audience demanded 15 curtain calls...
Sean O'Casey's Drums Under the Window is a lilting work that makes golden use of the English language. With this exception, however, the downtown offerings generally range from pretentious to overtly sheckel-minded. An example of a play with static ideas and superficial newness is Genet's The Balcony, one of off-Broadway's biggest hits. Despite its pretensions of originality, it bogs down in a miasma of unreality and philosophical despair. The play first states that men patronize brothels not for sexual satisfaction, but in order to fulfill self-illusions; to try to translate their dreamworlds into...
...quite stolid and spiritless. M. Philippe, alternately confident and cowed, displayed a rather narrow range of emotions, and I wished at times that he would explode in anger or dissolve in passion, instead of just standing still and raising his eyebrows. Michele Morgan, the disillusioned milliner, was also rather static; it seemed that the director had instructed her to play a long-suffering, cynical woman, and that's about all she did. Brigitte Bardot, who appeared now and then as another dragoon's lover, acted like a high school girl in her first play...