Word: stigmata
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...BIRTHDAY PARTY, by Harold Pinter, is a 1958 play written prior to The Caretaker and The Homecoming. Party lacks the dramatic sophistication of tone, tempo and themes of the two later plays; yet the telltale stigmata are all here-dread, panic, menace, mocking comic absurdity, the evasive unwillingness of people to level with each other. Except for Edward Flanders, the American cast is often blunt and plodding when it should be sardonic, cutting and athletic, but Pinter nevertheless provides prickly excitement and a tantalizing quota of questions without answers...
...BIRTHDAY PARTY, by Harold Pinter. In a season that began with unqualified disasters, this is the first qualified success. A 1958 play written prior to The Caretaker and The Homecoming, Party lacks the dramatic sophistication of tone, tempo and themes of the two later plays. Yet the telltale stigmata are all here-dread, panic, menace, mocking comic absurdity, the evasive unwillingness of people to level with each other. Except for Edward Flanders, the American cast is blunt and plodding when it should be sardonic, cutting and athletic, but Pinter provides prickly excitement and a tantalizing quota of questions without answers...
...young whose complexions and dispositions benefit from the pill. Many a woman entering menopause, confident that soon she can forget about contraception, is advised to stay on the pills because they postpone many of the stigmata of age-dryness and wrinkling of the skin, sagging bosom, edginess and depression, and a reduction of vaginal secretions that may make intercourse too painful...
...Compleat Senator. Audacious, perhaps. But preposterous? Not really. While Javits' faith might once have barred him even from fleeting consideration, the old religious and racial stigmata of U.S. politics were pretty well dissolved by John F. Kennedy's victory in 1960. In 1964, few voters were concerned that the G.O.P. presidential candidate was half-Jewish, his running mate a Catholic. "There is no office now closed to a Jew, including the presidency," says Javits, and he is convinced that a member of his faith will be a national candidate within the next decade. "It would be nice," he muses...
...Conerico Was Here to Stay, by Frank Gagliano, gives another squeeze to that rind of a man, the antihero. He shows the standard stigmata-conformity, terror, absence of identity, lack of responsibility and commitment-yet after he is stranded on a Manhattan subway platform, the vulnerable humanity of Mark Gordon's expressively modulated performance makes one care about him. Gagliano has a gift for capturing the acrid flavor and jagged tempo of the city's mental and physical derangements. A blind man, his white stick rattling frenetically, goes into a convulsive attack of "the crazies" as the city...