Word: themes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...curtain raiser by Tennessee Williams, This Property is Condemned, is equally well-performed, but the play is merely a minor re-working of the inevitable Williams theme of a woman who lives in a world of illusion. The boy who meets the tawdry heroine on a railroad embankment merely establishes the situation. Limited though it is, the part is well-handled by Walter McGinn. Jane Cronin is entrancing as she delivers this bubble-frail poetic monologue without benefit of scenery. She provides an object-lesson in good acting...
...best humorous writing turns on a man's well-intentioned efforts to accomplish something-from assembling a do-it-yourself barbecue pit to catching a taxi in a downpour-and the fun lies in his frustration. Purdy uses much the same theme, but his purpose is to reveal the horror underlying the humor. The father who gets kicked in the groin has been trying to make up to his small son for his orphaned state. The husband and wife who belabor each other seem right off the burlesque stage, but the story's aim is to expose...
Desolation of the Soul. In his most ambitious story, 63: Dream Palace, he tells of two young hillbillies from West Virginia who come to bad ends in Chicago, and of their only mourners, a writer improbably named Parkhearst Cratty and a wealthy matron most commonly called "greatwoman." Again the theme is one that could be comic-the adventures of a yokel in a big city. Again, the working out is pure terror, with murder of the body and desolation of the soul at the end. Author Purdy dislikes to be considered morbid and argues that "despair in art shows concern...
Yawps & Whimpers. Since the mid-403, Poet Rexroth, now 52, has presided over a circle of San Francisco writers he describes as "mature Bohemians." Their characteristic literary theme is the decline and fall of practically everybody, delivered in a tone that wavers between a yawp and a whimper. At the GHQ of the San Francisco poets, a tiny joint on Grant Avenue known simply as The Place, the non-squares were invited to gather on Sunday afternoons to "snarl at the cosmos, praise the unsung, defy the order." Poet Rexroth first carried the snarls into the jazz clubs last winter...
Miller took as the theme for this lecture, the first in a series of six, the quote: "The ego is more distant than any star." After examining two popular methods of understending the soul, introspection and dissection, he called for "location" as necessary for self-understanding...