Word: themes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...story of the Gunthers is wholly symbolic. Real hero of the play is the American outlook, its love of enterprise and liberty. This is an inspiring theme. But working crudely, emotionally, in headlines, Kaufman & Hart over-sentimentalize their theme. Canny showmen, they know that if, as Dr. Johnson said, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, it is also one of the first salvations of a box office; that mother love and dying for one's country are not only the stuff of great art but also the surefire cliches of popular entertainment; that a cavalcade...
...well as tragedy, The Death of the Heart tells a story as old as wickedness: the world's betrayal of innocence. But Elizabeth Bowen also introduces a provocative interaction: the world's discomfiture at the hands of the innocent. One paragraph condenses the pattern of the simple theme...
...latest, Here Comes a Candle, her theme is tiny, but so industriously does she magnify it that every character is touched by it, obsessed by it. The setting is New Moon Yard, an old tinderbox of a tenement in London. Some of the characters, mostly tenants of the Yard: a happy old Italian who hoards pound notes against a return to Palermo, scorns wasting two or three of them on fire insurance; an ex-Captain who lost all his nerve under fire, all his possessions in a fire; a cabinetmaker, who keeps forgetting to mail a letter to an insurance...
...contestants will name their poems (three allowed per poet) The World of Tomorrow, after the Fair's optimistic theme. Since poets today are not noted for their optimistic outlook, the Fair's prize competition raises one of the most interesting poetic questions of the year...
John Steinbeck's play appeared on Broadway in November of 1937 and promptly won the Critics Circle prize. To see it is an imperative theatrical errand if only to gain some understanding of the impressive heights to which a gifted handling of realism can raise an exceedingly fictional theme...