Word: sternhagen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hits one note loud and often: she speaks nearly all her lines in a sort of loony, distracted haze. Though her performance lacks shadings, she creates a memorable monster. Doug McKeon and Corey Parker are at once scary and pathetic as her sons. E.G. Marshall, John Wood and Frances Sternhagen do nice turns in support...
...these the Cleavers or the Bunkers, this family of four preparing for an ordinary Thanksgiving in 1973? There's Dad (Carroll O'Connor), screwing himself into his easy chair, deflecting harsh words and harder responsibilities. Mom (Frances Sternhagen) is patrolling the house in her robe and bunny snood, calling "Wakey uppy! Wakey uppy!" in the tinny cascades of Texas motherhood. Sis (Linda Cook) is chatting on the phone with her boyfriend and threatening to "devote my entire life to crisis counseling for the holiday-impaired. My mother can be the poster child." And young Jeremy (Christopher Fields), just back from...
Home Front was first staged last June in London, starring Sternhagen and under the direction of Michael Attenborough. Both repeat their roles in the excellent Broadway production that opened last week. One might expect O'Connor (as a milder Archie Bunker) or Fields (in a part that cries out for an actor with the implosive intensity of a Sean Penn) to commandeer the spotlight. But Home Front is Sternhagen's show, allowing her to nail down, with an increasingly desperate comic urgency, the suburban matriarch. This mom will not be accused of screaming at her children: "I was using...
...somehow stumbled into class? But it is Romulus Linney who has finally done something wonderful with the notion. In P.M., the masterly miniature that is the centerpiece in this evening of one-acters off-Broadway, he places at one end of the seminar table a prim-looking teacher (Frances Sternhagen) whose lack of success as a novelist has not yet sapped her idealism. At the other end sits Bufford Bullough (Leon Russom). Bufford looks like Thomas Wolfe, writes like William Faulkner and carries around with him in a cardboard box the burden of his dreams: a thousand-page manuscript...
...cast is marvelously adept, especially Sternhagen and Dishy. She never camouflages the essential hideousness of the character she portrays, and he distills a tormenting anguish from the dregs of self-pity...