Word: tone
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Whitemore's use of soliloquies in a realistic framework brings his competence as a playwright into serious question. The tone and execution of the play strive for realism, but Whitemore undercuts it with the formal monologue--one of the most contrived devices in the dramatist's handbook. Simple reminiscences intended to add dimension to the characters, these solo speeches instead subtract from the play's impact...
...deep waters, Wanda. As your local representative of the uptrodden gender, I frankly had no idea that cheerfulness was a sexist plot. If I correctly recall our last 42 arguments, you have been telling me that men not only have trouble expressing their feelings, they may even be emotionally tone deaf. Wouldn't it be logical for you to argue that women , smile more because they are less blocked emotionally, not because niceness is a symbol of servitude...
Wanda: Nice try, wily husband. In fact, the smile is a hostility deflector, and it is trotted out more often by disadvantaged groups. Women smile more than men because they have to appease men and because everyone assumes we are responsible for the emotional tone of social life...
...from his cell on Pittsburgh's death row and lands smack on top of the warden's beautiful wife (Diane Keaton). Ron Nyswaner's script is based on fact--a 1901 jailbreak masterminded by the young matriarch who had fallen in love with one of the convicts--but the tone is pure High Hollywood elegiac. This is revolution as amour fou, which Diane Keaton knows something about from her turns as Louise Bryant in Reds and the frazzled Mata Hari in The Little Drummer Girl. Keaton and Australian Director Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career) might seem to make a good...
...rare confession of a Soviet mistake, the Soviet news agency TASS said the missile went off course after it was launched during an exercise in the Barents Sea, "and disappeared in a westerly direction." The apologetic tone contrasted sharply with the Soviet reaction following similar events. When, for example, a Soviet submarine was detected in shallow waters near a Swedish naval base in 1981, Moscow denied that Swedish waters had been violated, and it accused the Swedes of trying to create an anti-Soviet atmosphere. As for the misguided missile, as this week began it was still missing...