Word: tritely
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Woven together with haunting languge and a bizarre story line, Ocean Sea centers around four lost souls staying at a seaside inn, each hoping that the ocean's therapeutic power will heal their spiritual wounds. The characters are a mixture of precocious children and wizened adults who all offer trite commentary on the book's constant effort to present deep and soul-searching questions. Perhaps the most ridiculous characters are the two men: Professor Bartleboom, who tries to measure the end of the infinite sea, and Plasson the painter who tries to paint where the sea begins. As Bartleboom combs...
...Donnell's touch is gentle. He does not allow his narrative to slide into cliches, a balancing act hard to achieve when commenting on commericalized topics. This is perhaps most evident in his treatment of Christmas, a holiday so over-wrought with symbolism that any statement can seem trite. O'Donnell couples Tad's cynicism and mocking attitude with an underlying sense of hope and faith in the holiday. Tad is aware of the fake forms Christmas can take on; upon walking into his brother and sister-in-law's showcase of a home, he observes that "the impersonally tasteful...
...Givin' My Love to You," Nelson Braxton pours his heart out over some girl who knew his "heart was in desperate need for love and affection." This girl, he says, "looked in me/There's no doubt in my mind that this love is real." The lines are a bit trite. It's almost trite of me to say they're trite they're so trite. And Nelson's voice needs a bit more coaching (perhaps from Toni Braxton?) before he launches himself into another love-stricken psychological miasma. The brothers' remake of "I'll Make Love to You," is torture...
Caroline Hall and Randall Jaynes, playing the title characters Bette and Boo, make a convincingly disfunctional couple. Hall in particular shines as the wistful Bette, a woman whose surface seems trite but who claims a deeply troubled and romantic interior. Perhaps the most touching scene in the play is a monologue Bette delivers on the phone to an old girlfriend she has lost touch with. For the first time in the production, Bette sheds her exterior flakiness and openly reveals the profoundly disappointed young woman she has become. Hall excellently maneuvers between Bette's exterior stupidity and interior complexity, consistently...
...tennis lingo (as well as medical jargon) can become slightly tedious. The analogies and comparisons between tennis, medicine and life sometimes seem amazingly twisted and contrived, and sometimes annoyingly simple. To truly enjoy the book you will have to find it in your heart to forgive the occasional trite phrase, such as "El Paso receded from view, and with it his hopes and dreams." It may take a few chapters, or longer, to accept the fact that, yes, tennis really is being used to deal with this hugely serious subject...