Word: tamerlis
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...play's most demanding scenes. Surely her approach is the one Director William Friedkin wanted; his work in films (The French Connection, The Exorcist) is notable for its harrowing power, not its subtlety. This leaves Max von Sydow, as the doctor, to prowl the set like a lion tamer confronting an unpredictable new beast. He need not worry. Bancroft's lioness isn't hungry enough to eat him. She has already devoured Kempinski's lamb of a play...
...with the contestant, dressed as a gladiator, getting either the girl of his dreams and $12 million or a man-eating tiger ("flown in by Air India") and certain death. It's set in the office of the brash young producer, who faces, in turn, a huge black tiger-tamer in safari costume; the awkwardly toupeed M.C. rehearsing the moment when he's supposed to crack the pressure of the event; the "lady"--an actress whom the contestant loved from afar when she lived near him as a boy--who doesn't want to go back to Mississippi with...
...opening, with the producer playing tiger and thrashing on the floor with his tamer is deliriously silly and crazy, and it's a pity the play is never quite as insane when the audience becomes oriented. Silverstein has written some riotous speeches here, the characters are gems, and now and then a line will be both starkly funny and horrible--as when the producer says to the Lord in mock prayer with the shivering contestant that maybe this poor, white-trash hick has only a 50-per-cent chance of survival and happiness, "but Lord, that 50 per cent chance...
...near wasteland of postwar French abstraction. Even the best talents involved in it, like Nicolas de Staël (1914-55), now look somewhat mannered and superficial; no wonder that the paintings of the New York School had such a traumatic impact on their aesthetic environment. Nothing could be tamer than the late-cubist scaffolding, the tidy compartmenting of the surface that provided the formal recipes of artists like Serge Poliakoff and Maurice Estève. Then there were the "religious" abstractionists, like Alfred Manessier, with their mock stained glass; and the gestural painters, like the appalling Georges Mathieu...
...reads and writes maybe too many, it's sort of a relief to deal with a character who is quite innocent of all that." Furthermore, the young Updike never seriously considered remaining in his native state: "Had I stayed a Pennsylvanian, I would have been a much tamer one than Harry Angstrom; I'm not sure by any stretch that I could have lived his disorderly life...