Word: tragic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Carol D'Arcangelis puts in a solid performance as the fierce and sarcastic rich bitch, Joanne. Along with Amy and Robert, she is one of the most interesting characters in the show. Her drunken, jealous solo, "The Ladies Who Lunch," projects an exciting undercurrent of tragic intensity...
...characters also forces Alexander to generalize in cliches, giving her some difficulty. Detail is her forte; generalizations do not always survive mass cliches. The author gives excellent treatment to Tarnower's complex anti-Semitism. Alexander grounds her conclusions in a wealth of quotations. But attributing Harris's tragic end to the emotional frustration of "ladies of a particular northern upper-class WASP variety" becomes a kind of shorthand which hinders us from understanding Jean Harris's personality...
...filming of Cecil Andrews' tragic act of self-destruction [March 21] shows that people like to see others get hurt. Consider the excess of violence on television and in films. While TV-news leaders condemned the judgment of WHMA's news director, the major networks all showed portions of the tape that recorded a man setting himself on fire. The networks cannot resist satisfying the public's grisly appetite...
...Middle Ages, like A.R. Gurney Jr.'s other plays about the declining Protestant elite (Scenes from American Life, the current off-Broadway hit The Dining Room), is a wistful, elegiac comedy that preserves a tight-lipped emotional reserve: confrontations that could be tragic are played for rueful laughter. Unlike most of Gurney's other plays, however, The Middle Ages has a well-knit, symmetrical plot. It offers two love stories, a star-crossed one between a clownish boy and the girl who occasionally impels him to grow up, and another, almost accidental, between the boy's father...
...sometime novelist (Entertaining Strangers, The Gospel According to Joe) and television scriptwriter (an adaptation for PBS of the John Cheever story O Youth and Beauty!), Gurney is writing a play that he hopes will take on bigger and more tragic proportions than his 16 slight, mostly short stage works to date. Says he: "When I start writing a script, it always seems serious. But some how the pratfalls sneak in, and then I fight to keep them." His upbringing, he believes, has provided more than simply the raw material of his scripts: "I think it was the very fact that...