Word: themes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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HUGHIE is a one-act, 65-minute postlude to The Iceman Cometh and Eugene O'Neill's obsessive theme that truth kills and the lie of illusion nourishes life. In a performance of consummate skill, Jason Robards does precisely what O'Neill always asked of himself, even in lesser plays -he lays his life on the lines...
...butler. The first thing he sees is a scale model of the chateau, perfect in every exterior and interior detail. This permits clever wordplay on the ambiguity of appearance v. reality, but its blunt literalism sadly lacks the intellectual subtleties that Pirandello so often brought to the same theme. Julian meets Miss Alice (Irene Worth) and at the end of Act II is seduced by her. The seduction scene owes a discernible if unintentional debt to Tennessee Williams' The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More. In that play, Mrs. Goforth, also an enormously wealthy woman, nakedly...
...tinge of melancholy that is the unique trait of the koto. The opening melody, sketched against a background of moaning strings and sudden percussive bursts, followed the austere style of the ancient gagaku court music of Japan, then shifted in the second movement to a distinctly Western hymnal theme. In the final movement, strains of East and West were interlaced in a rapid rhythmic pattern between the koto, flute and harp. Though sometimes lost in the thicket of strings, the high-strung koto proved a solo instrument of intriguing versatility. At the end, Stokowski locked arms with...
...Gospel According to Peanuts (Knox; $1.50), Short contends that the cartoon, whose creator is a lay preacher in the Church of God of Anderson, Ind., is a modern variety of prophetic literature, full of useful parables for the times. For example, "the doctrine of original sin is a theme constantly being dramatized in Peanuts." When Charlie Brown gloomily confides to Linus that he has "been confused right from the day I was born," he sums up the "nameless woe" that is at the heart of man's predicament...
...Greek poet Archilochus said: "The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Eugene O'Neill was a hedgehog playwright, and the one big thing he knew was this: the truth kills-the lie of illusion nourishes life. O'Neill dealt with this theme long and lovingly in The Iceman Cometh. Then, 23 years ago, he wrote a one-act, 65-minute postlude to that play; Hughie is a kind of Iceman's ice cube. But O'Neill was a stage animal to the theater born, and even his minor efforts are brushes...