Word: tensions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...scenes in the first act follow with an almost anticipated sense of fatality. Agresta, now as Helen's mother, manages to exploit the tension of the production; she must emote, yet her dialogue must appear to be a sardonic condemnation of maternal care. A genuine frustration at the play's emotional detachment resonates with the audience as the mother forces her daughter to eat a potato. However, the play becomes too rapidly melodramatic too early, as the sense that the characters are mocking themselves undermines the growing emotional tension in the play...
...Helen leads the audience through her honeymoon. In the sterile hotel, she faces her boss-husband with contrived fear that appears self-consciously artificial and mechanic. Gunn does not negotiate the production's tension as well as Agresta; his dialogue occasionally weaves emotional cadence into a part that ought to be strictly mechanical...
...more concrete understanding of the stilted dialogue and the odd movements of the actors and actresses, yet the sense of not fully understanding the dynamics of the plot piques the audience's interest. Machinal reinforces the audience's worst suspicions through its oddly lit, sparsely staged and undeveloped emotional tension, for the play suggests that emotions do not matter, and existence is merely a sterilized and mechanical occurrence...
That is the essence of life illuminated on the decks of Her Majesty's Ship Pinafore, ruled by the fair and just Captain Corcoran. Aboard, there is, save for that towards the reviled presence of Dick Deadeye, little animosity. There is tension to be sure, because Corcoran's daughter Josephine is in love with a seaman, Ralf Rackstraw, but she is betrothed instead to a much, much older man, Admiral of the Queen's Navy, Sir Joseph Porter. The Captain himself is in love with dear little Buttercup, but cannot marry her because she is a poorly Bumboat woman...
...politic are those who, despite their feelings on an issue, "just don't want to get into it." Maybe they feel the exchange of ideas will leave them where they are anyway and just create tension in a rooming group or a friendship. "It's just not worth it," they think, and so they are willing to step back and keep their ideas to themselves. They can see Harvard isn't the place where each existential moment deserves its own observations, where "what it all means" might be as important as the bottom line...