Word: tragic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...peering into the well of his talent, that the fault for not recognizing masterpieces in it lies with ourselves. It's like the familiar Barnett Newman problem: having for so long been told that the famous "Zip" in Newman's canvases contains the unnameable name of God or the tragic condition of humankind, one must make an almost perverse effort of will to look past all the midrash and see a vertical stripe...
...outstanding Crimson Dance team appeared twice in well-choreographed segments, which remarkably were not out of place in the play. The dancers, clad in solid black, seemed representative of the rapidity with which the drama heads towards its inevitably tragic...
Perhaps the greatest triumph of this production was that it succeeds in vitalizing a play considered by many critics as evidence that Shakespeare had exhausted the tragic vein. Coriolanus is about violence, power, politics, and pain, themes that are just as relevant to our 20th century America as they were to Shakespeare's Elizabethan England and to Ancient Rome. Carefully conceived and performed, Olson made Coriolanus feel like it was written yesterday. For a play that is almost 400 years old, there is no higher mark of success...
...production's tragic flaw, then, consists of a desire to package the play's ambiguities up neatly. After all these fine performances, the interpretation put at the end upon Goldberg and McCann's departure with Stanley comes across as heavy-handed, and far less interesting than the strange world the characters have been inhabiting for the last hour or so. And the ending to each act--placing one character in the corner of the exaggerated perspective created by a slanting set--already pushes patience...
...living room, in his guy-at-home uniform of worn jeans, flannel shirt and socked feet, Michael (David Egan) likes to imagine himself lecturing at Carnegie Hall on the sex lives of superheroes. Eleanor (Abigail Gray) likes to rewrite love stories into tragedies--"Or, if they're already tragic but in a really noble way, I rewrite 'em so they're squalid and bitter." What's keeping this perfect pair apart? Only Michael's obsession with his heartless ex-girlfriend, Lisa (Erica Mitnick), who haunts his Carnegie Hall fantasies, asking steamy questions like, "Who was the first comic book character...