Word: tortuous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...weight of seriousness or the burden of a three-hour-long performance. As written, the plot goes out of its way to lead all the characters into vengeance's grasp: secondary scenes--like the one which shows the death of the wife of Antonio, a nondescript lord--are tortuous and hinder the rest of the play...
Like most operatic plots, that of The Marriage of Figaro is tortuous and ultimately unnecessary. Suffice to say that it involve the feudal privilege known as droit de seigneur and, some hours later, reunites one character with an unlikely set of parents. Unity comes not from the storyline but from the voices, which without exception stay well in control of a difficult and lengthy score--especially Knowles, who must awkwardly sing the show's first notes from his knees...
...Freeman nears the end of his final circuit of the night. Having wound through the tortuous Cambridge Streets--from Currier to the Science Center to Lamont to the IAB to Mather House and to Peabody Terrace--he turns another corner and stops at another stop sign. "Sometimes," he says. "I stop and think if I had driven in a straight line I could have gone so far. I could have really gone somewhere...
...SALVADOR. By the standards of El Salvador's tortuous three-year civil war, the first signs of the impending debacle were small ones. As some 70 members of the country's National Police guarded the once bustling agricultural center of Berlin (pop. about 30,000), guerrillas launched a cautious nighttime raid. For an hour small-arms fire popped back and forth between the opposing forces. Then the guerrillas slipped away into the surrounding cotton and coffee fields of Usulután, one of El Salvador's richest and most strategic departments...
TIMOTHY CROUSE writes about it in his literary ode to reporters on the tortuous campaign trail: It's the fear of missing the assasination or the major gaffe that finally rolls every member of the pack out of the sack at some ungodly hour day after day. But not even the most hard-assed editor would have legitimately expected his reporter to be there on October 21, when Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Richard Headlee dropped the campaign's bombshell and dramatically dashed his fortunes...