Word: sustaining
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What counts here, of course, is not what's said but how it's said. With such a fine line separating art from reality, the success of the show depends upon the actors' ability to sustain appropriate distance from the audience and from the humor of their lines. The moment an actor shows he is conscious of the absurdity of what he's saying, the delicate veil shatters and the play falls flat. With only a few setbacks, the Dunster House production of "The Importance of Being Ernest" presents a delightfully self-contained and poker-faced version of Wilde...
Brigit Fasolino (Janc) gives a powerful performance at times, but fails to sustain it throgh the second act. As Jane moves along the emotional register through anger to bitterness to frustrated resignation, she seems to go too easily, too quickly, with a lack of feeling that confuses us. In some sense, the performance still works because the character herself is confused--but overall it doesn't come off as naturally as it should. Fasolino does manage a certain sardonic spunky style that carries her strongly in the beginning, but as this falls apart too effortlessly, so too does her portrait...
...those seats," says Flynn. "If he gets blown out, there's no way we can hold on. So it's terribly important to us how he does relatively as well as absolutely." All this recalculation, however, assumes a reversal of the candidates' histories: Mondale repeatedly failed to sustain momentum during last spring's primary campaign, while Reagan recovered convincingly from early setbacks in both...
...lacks the capacity to astonish or, it would seem, to inspire. If the audience is to become suspensefully and emotionally involved, it must be made to feel a certain ambiguity about Charlie. It must wonder if she really has enough emotional stability and enough skill in performance to sustain under deadly pressure the elaborate impersonation that the Israelis require of her. In other words, what is needed is Annie Hall's neurotic flightiness, or at least her actressy self-awareness. Instead, Keaton brings mostly a sort of put-upon sullenness to her part...
...united" Ireland, but a new civil war--and bloodier than any we have seen so far--in which the embittered minority in the North would attempt to destroy the occupying force of the South. This is the nightmare which Noraid's bombs are designed to create and sustain: for how could such a state be held together except by the superior use of terror? Yet this is the reality of the romantic dream Irish Americans think they are in the process of creating...