Word: tragedians
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Carol Burnett's childhood might have produced a tragedian instead of a comedian. In this autobiography disguised as a letter to her three daughters, she runs through a series of blackout sketches that are by turns sad, hilarious and grotesque. Burnett grew up in a shabby Hollywood apartment with her beloved maternal grandmother. Nanny used to tie a rolled Christian Science Monitor around her waist so her "insides wouldn't fall out." She took Carol to the movies; then, "when it was time to go home, we'd go to the bathroom, and she'd empty all the toilet paper...
...even in disappointed love, Shaw could never quite play the tragedian; the best he could manage was Pagliacci. These are the years of Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the original Liza. Shaw was lured to her drawing room, Laurence notes, "at which time, by Mrs. Campbell's subtle contrivance, her bosom and his fingertips came into fleeting contact." Shaw is instantly smitten; he confesses to a friend, "I am on the verge of 56. There has never been anything so ridiculous, or so delightful, in the history of the world...
Tyrone is a failed actor with a tragedian's soul and a Broadway tinhorn's compulsion for self-abasement in bad booze and worse sex. Josie, the daughter of his Connecticut tenant farmer, has adopted the manner of a slut in order to hide her Madonna's heart. Their tragedy is that their one night of (sexless) love comes too late. From it they achieve not redemption but a brief, bittersweet memory; not" I enough, one suspects, to light their separate darkening paths into the future...
...office to be the first to herald I ill," wrote Aeschylus, the Greek tragedian, in the 5th century B.C. By that standard, the director of the Congressional Budget Office occupies one of the illest offices in Washington. Since becoming the CBO's first director when the agency was set up in 1975, Alice Rivlin has had the thankless task of telling Congress how big future budget deficits will be and proposing various alternatives, most of them politically unpalatable, for reducing the shortfall. After eight often frustrating years, Rivlin, 52, last week turned that role over to Rudolph G. Penner...
More than any classical tragedian. O'Neill is obsessed with death-and neurosis. Orin, and to a lesser degree Ezra, are shattered by the horrors of war. And for all of the main characters, death eventually becomes the only reality. The sick not only destroy each other, but leave the healthy (such as the neighboring Niles family) irreparably scarred. Such an absolute pessimism is distinctly modern, and purely O'Neill...