Word: tragical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Shurcliffe then moves on to paint a grim picture of what the real sonic boom would be like. The chapters on "Annoyance and Injury to People" conjures up visions of light sleepers being rousted from their beds by sudden booms and surgeons making tragic blunders when boomed at the operating table. There are statements from newspapers telling about deaths from sonic booms, and even psychologists' analyses of the "irritation and frustration, as well as dramatic declines in work efficiency" that chronic booming would produce...
Underneath this droll gimmick, however, is much more. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are at the center of Stoppard's work, and they become its tragic heroes. Like Didi and Gogo, who bide their time with games of the spirit while waiting for the never-to-appear Godot, Stoppard's heroes devise their own games to endure the waiting for their Godot...
While Stoppard's play could probably not have been written before Beckett come along, it is every bit a peer for Waiting for Godot. The comic and tragic elements, brilliant in themselves, are ingeniously balanced and woven into the Hamlet framework. The dialogue flows like nothing I've heard in a long time, and Stoppard uses the English language with more precision than any other playwright around...
...TIME'S story on "Black vs. Jew: A Tragic Confrontation" [Jan. 31] was excellent. Both the Jews and the Negroes share a history of oppression. Both share a history of ghetto existence. But one thing was in favor of the Jew: his skin is white...
...COULD BE argued that the controversial introduction by Candice Van Ellison--which should be read in its entirety--is valuable for its basic, even if deplorably tragic, honesty. But I think it is far more important to see the catalogue, as well as the whole show, as the museum's first and most important groping toward a new forum for the discussion of contemporary social problems. It would be self-defeating to expect every isolated statement or display in the exhibition to offer a definitive statement on a very difficult set of relationships...