Word: tolan
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...incorporates elements that would be trite on a plain-old drama, such as the shaky, handheld camera. But here they're starkly funny and McNeil an arresting (sorry) puzzle. He's also the sort of character who makes network execs pop Mylanta as he pops pills. So Leary and Tolan were surprised when ABC actively recruited them. "We said, 'You'll never buy it,'" recalls Leary. "'We're not going to change the language. We're not going to change the behavior.' And they said, 'Don't worry about it.'" Indeed, Bloomberg boasts, "No character in prime time has ever...
Unfortunately, the screenplay (by Kenneth Lonergan and Peter Tolan) goes downhill from there, and the stock Freudianisms-initially the objects of satire-start to take over. Worse, the film begins to take them seriously. The story of Paul's guilt over his father's murder (a murder he witnessed) contains every cliche imaginable, and could have been ripped wholesale from a Z-grade movie-of-the-week. The cheap psychology is necessary to the comedy, but it gets bogged down in its own lack of depth. Paul's cathartic moments feel as if they were intended to be touching...
Olive Talley, reporter for the Dallas Morning News; Terry Tang, columnist for the Seattle Times; Andrew Tolan, executive producer with Desert West Research and Information; and Matthew Zencey, assistant editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News were also among those selected...
...Timothy Mason's In a Northern Landscape to the title creature in Patrick Tovatt's Bartok As Dog. Feminism, incest and home cooking were other recurrent themes. But on half a dozen occasions one could hear distinctive voices rising above the collective murmur-and, in Kathleen Tolan's A Weekend Near Madison, the unmistakable cry of an infant...
...three acts and at 2½ hours, A Weekend Near Madison might benefit from losing ten or 15 minutes and one offstage death. But even in its present form, as directed by Mann and performed by a pristine ensemble, Playwright Tolan's work radiates promise and achievement. Its theme, of community under pressure, also helps define this Louisville weekend, where actors may appear in three or four different plays, turn their talent to playwrighting and even schmooze with the critics. The beleaguered American theater can take hope from these artists, all stretching to see the same horizon...