Word: thrall
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Amid spasms of public anarchy, Anton Vowl, a Parisian insomniac in psychological discomfort, prowls his lodgings by night. Hypochondria haunts him, plus a doom that has him in thrall: "A unit is lacking. An omission, a blank, a void that nobody but him knows about, thinks about, that, flagrantly, nobody wants to know or think about. A missing link." As "panicky as a pig in an abbatoir," Vowl awaits his karma...
...moment that, in fact, the painter hadn't seen. And though Manet was not notable for his piety in real life, he tried to reinvigorate biblical painting with his great image of The Dead Christ and the Angels, 1864, just to show that he wasn't in thrall to Courbet's realism or to his anticlericalism -- to be really free, you have to rebel against the rebels...
...Room to unleash the comedic genius held in check by uptight Captain Mandrake and the Boy Scout president. His Dr. Strangelove is the crazed head of the American weapons program, apparently because he considers it the closest modern equivalent to his beloved Third Reich. Strangelove holds the audience in thrall as he goes further over the top with every line, straining in his wheelchair to extract himself from the death grip of his own right hand, a powerful character actor in its own right. This is the classic Sellers--black leather glover a demonic twinkle...
...Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound, this play does not give the narrator a penchant for candor. We hear little about how this way of working helped or hurt his craft, satisfied or thwarted his soul. Structurally, the piece owes much to Biloxi: a group in thrall to a dangerous leader, a boot camp that hardens the head more than the heart, a tense scene where some teammate is to be unjustly cast out, a summing-up of everyone's future fate. But Biloxi had tragic overtones, while Laughter on the 23rd Floor is comedy, comedy...
...kill you." But none is more harrowing than the moment of Ike's killer kiss. It shows how tender a man's domination can seem and how a woman, prodded by terror and responsibility, can see no option except acceding to his abuse. The happy ending -- escape from his thrall, sanity restored, a career of her own -- comes later...