Word: theo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Clare Campion, 42, a successful novelist living in New York City, pays one of her infrequent visits home to Mountain City in western North Carolina. There she finds her mother Lily, her stepfather Ralph Quick and her two half brothers, Theo, 28, and Rafe, 26, all of them behaving incorrigibly in character and thereby reminding Clare of why she had left them and the South in the first place. Her only respite from what she calls "the ongoing theatricals of the family" is the companionship of her childhood friend Julia Richardson. Years earlier, Julia gave up a promising career...
Hence Clare's discomfiture over her latest trip home is suddenly dwarfed by tragedy: Theo, whose wife has left him with custody of their young son, goes off one Sunday afternoon to see his current girlfriend, a nurse who is trying to disentangle herself from their affair. Within hours, both are dead of gunshot wounds, apparently administered by Theo in a murder-suicide. This event throws the members of the Quick family, their friends and the close-knit society of Mountain City into paroxysms of confusion and self-reproach. What made Theo do it? Could he have been saved...
...each character looks back at Theo and searches for clues to explain his fate, a complex portrait slowly emerges, not only of a troubled young man but of an entire community losing its ideals and energies. Theo's marriage to Snow Mullins, a red-neck girl with a ninth-grade education, was a gauntlet thrown down at the Quicks' precarious sense of stature, indeed at Mountain City's communal illusion of social propriety. Theo's younger brother Rafe remembers, "I mean, it was embarrassing at the wedding, seeing how Mom's friends tried to keep their faces from showing...
Cosby's influence is also seen in the show's frequent, but uninsistent, references to black culture. When Son Theo has to read a book for school, chances are it will be Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man; when Denise is considering colleges, all-black schools are the topic of discussion. Each script is reviewed by Poussaint to ensure psychological credibility and avoid negative stereotyping. His sanitizing hand can be as heavy as a network censor's. In the original script for one Halloween episode, Vanessa and a friend were to dress up as a witch and Captain Hook. Poussaint vetoed...
...Calf: gold is collected and formed into an idol; a ritual slaughter of animals is followed by a sacrifice of Four Naked Virgins; there is an orgy of drunkenness, sexual license and suicide. By forsaking emotionally neutral biblical robes for specific ghetto mufti (only Moses, portrayed by Bass-Baritone Theo Adam, is outfitted in Old Testament garb), Ponnelle risked having the quarrelsome Jews appear like characters in one of Julius Streicher's Nazi racist fantasies, evoking the stereotype of avariciousness and the calumny of blood libel. Even the splendid performances of Adam, British Tenor Philip Langridge as a smooth Aron...