Word: stoppard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There's a radiant moment in Tom Stoppard's Hapgood , which opened in revival last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, when Kerner, a Russian physicist and spy, celebrates the littleness of atoms. The public, he explains to the woman he loves, simply doesn't comprehend how minuscule the particles truly are. He tells her, "I could put an atom into your hand for every second since the world began, and you would have to squint to see the dot of atoms in your palm." Some men offer their beloved the moon. Kerner offers his a speck in her palm...
...Lesson, a portrait of a megalomaniacal teacher, reflected dark satire of the powerful. Rhinoceros blended those themes with a manic physical portrait of a city where everyone turns into a rampaging beast. This eccentric mix of humor and horror, of prattle and inarticulate profundity, influenced writers from Tom Stoppard to Edward Albee. The plays are widely taught at colleges and high schools and probably helped shape the surrealist sensibility of much contemporary TV comedy...
...orders something else, because he is in a twilight funk called "a Philadelphia." In The Universal Language, Ives' warmest, newest sketch, a woman with a speech impediment enrolls in a course for a jabberwocky tongue that only she and her teacher speak: English is "John Cleese," stammering is "tongue Stoppard...
Ives is a wondrous wordmaster and, as spiffily directed by Jason McConnell / Buzas, these elfin works could be called Stoppard Lite. But they are really Beckett Brisk, for they are about the creative process, frantic and forlorn, of getting through life. They suggest that all human existence is an improvisatory rehearsal for some grand opening night that may never arrive. Panic is the universal language. And yet, as Ives shows, rewriting life can produce a happy ending. Destiny may be, as his Trotsky says, "only a capitalist explanation for the status quo," but it can also be a sure thing...
Lori E. Smith '93-'94 is Associate Editorial Chair of The Crimson. She spent most of 1991 on a kibbutz in northern Israel. "Cricket Bats and Cudgels," in case you were wondering, comes from Tom Stoppard's play "The Real Thing...