Word: surreal
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...production underlines this: Patricia Woodbridge's desolate set announces from the start that less is more. And at the end, on the blank stage of the reporter's mind, nothing is everything. He is not alone. The imaginative playgoer, who has assisted throughout in peopling this surreal mindscape, thus implicates himself in the reporter's disintegration. The successive circles of hell blend and accelerate into a whirlpool of familiar, frightening apparitions. The Viet Nam nightmare is alive and well. "That story" is everyone's. -By Richard Corliss
...strange part is the air of pleased surprise and originality that attends each rediscovery. It is always odd to realize how short the collective memory is. Evidently, in times of tumblingly surreal change in the world, the human does not transmit from parent to child certain basic lore and procedural data. Knowledge that any peasant instinctively possesses now arrives at the front door in a burst of light, like revelation. A doctor who opened a free clinic for hippies in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the late '60s found that his patients were showing up with...
...said that I would return when the swords flowered," declaimed Salvador Dali, 76, quoting from a Catalan poet "and ja soc aqui [I am here]. I shall be so brief that I have already finished." Thus began a slightly surreal press conference in the artist's home town of Figueras, Spain, that ended his mysterious six months of seclusion. To bring poetry to life, Dali carried an elaborate, eagle-headed sword and distributed tuberoses to reporters. His costume was no less vivid: a leopardskin coat and red barrenita cap. Answering questions in French, Spanish and Catalan, the painter declared...
...Madame Adare sounds like a jumble, it is. In previous works, Silverman, 42, and Foreman, 43, deliberately avoided linear plot lines in favor of surreal musical and visual images, with results that were sometimes beguiling. Here there are too many images and, perversely, too much plot. Silverman's music is as always, eclectic and occasionally witty. When Adare decides to become an opera singer, for instance, the orchestra plays strains from Boris Godunov. Unfortunately, Silverman seems to have no point of view, and his music is an uninspired mélange...
...something wrong in his eyes. It's nearly impossible to pin down his expression. He is pleasant to his "boss", and yet maybe there's something else there. English is not his language, and hence there is an impenetrable distance, a profound gap in comprehension. It is all pleasantly surreal, this place Australia, so vast and so unnaturally quiet. The Aborigine customs fit it well, the strange crouches, the choreography of the wilderness, the animal sounds and the ever present chanting, the mystical Aborigine incantations which seem appropriate in this eerie wilderness. And yet, when the Aborigines speak English, when...