Word: throwaway
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...roll making rude noises on the periphery -- attacking the soul when it is restlessly idling between gigs. Bird, for all his troubles, is a wonderfully attractive figure, delighting in the lilt of big words and fine phrases, turning the memory of the moment he found his style into a throwaway comic anecdote. When he steals a saxophone from a rival who has gone over to rock, he tootles a few notes on it and says contemptuously, "I wanted to see if it could play more than one note at a time...
That is a simple but accurate description of a situation approaching the crisis stage throughout the U.S. The affluent, fast-paced, throwaway American culture is producing trash on a stupendous scale. Between 1960 and 1986, the amount of American garbage grew 80%, from 87.5 million tons to 157.7 million tons annually. It is expected to increase 22% by the year 2000, when the malodorous mound will weigh 192.7 million tons...
...large part, the garbage crisis is a cultural crisis. The development of a throwaway, convenience culture helped create this mess; a real solution may require cultural change. For example, more than 20% of U.S. garbage comprises grass clippings and leaves stuffed into plastic bags and left for collection. Householders should simply leave that grass on their lawns or rake - it into a mulch pile, ignoring and thus revising the cultural demand for a golf green-neat lawn. Another cultural change would be required to get Americans to recycle 50% of their trash, as Japanese do. Cultural change is notoriously slow...
What does still work is Albee's sense of throwaway absurdity. A good deal of this absurdity appears in the dialogue's intentional inanities, cliches and fragmentary conversations. Some comes from the situation: when Mrs. Barker visits Mommy and Daddy, she removes her dress, as if it were a coat or a hat, and spends the rest of the play in her slip...
...stage directions to a snapping string, but each has his own sense of what it meant. To one, it suggests the call of a heron; to another, an owl; and to a third, a cable breaking in a distant mine shaft. In most productions the moment is a throwaway. In a few it hints at the theme of an encroaching Industrial Revolution to which this doomed family cannot adapt. In the splendidly insightful version now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the incident becomes a central metaphor. Just as the characters cannot resolve the objective truth of what they heard...