Word: terrae
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Throughout On the Verge these "Victorian lady travellers" engage in an endless volley of pithy, alliterative, and highly allusive language. Plagiarizing from sources as varied as Joyce, Shakespeare, and the slang of fifties Americana, they wend their way through the kaleidoscopic landscape of "Terra Incognita," a territorial hybrid of the 19th century African Congo and the Land of the Blue Meanies from the Beatles' acid-crazed 1967 animation, "Yellow Submarine." This land is to be imagined rather than perceived: at the playwright's behest the set is relatively sparse...
Given the burdensome text of the play, its often trying twists and turns, and the demand for imagination rather than representation, the cast pulls it off rather well. Michelle Haner is well-cast as the youthful and somewhat spacey Alex, who flirts with the various characters encountered in "Terra Incognita" and has a deep penchant for the "slanguage" of 1955. Susan Gray maintains a prim conservatism throughout the play as Fanny, a young old-maid from the Midwest. Amanda Frye wields words well as Mary, a "passionate scientist" with a particularly obscure vocabulary and an inclination to corny eloquence...
...hall's century-old Roman brick and terra cotta are suggested on the tower by a skin of brownish and amber brick in five shades, and the molding and cornice lines of Carnegie's beaux arts facade are continued across the front of Pelli's building. The high-rise is wrapped by thick metal bands at six-floor intervals corresponding to the older building's height...
...venerated by neoclassicists a century before. Provincial antiquity seemed less mined out and more alive than mainstream classicism. Thus in Italy -- Massimo Campigli's painting, for instance, or Marino Marini's sculpture -- the % emphasis shifted from Roman marbles and Greek urns to the rougher, more vital- looking frescoes and terra-cottas of the Etruscans. The idea was to recapture a sense of antiquity that connoted a spirit of place, an Arcadian flavor, more Hesiodic than Augustan...
...nearly 5 million people who, in little more than a week, made the journey cannot quite believe they did, and the faces of the thousands who pour through frontier crossings every day are bright with expectation. In Berlin, East Germans huddle over subway maps as they head into Western terra incognita, a place most of them know only from television; at other checkpoints their cars pile up for miles...