Word: unreal
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...down a superior opponent, that they should go to the mark prepared to carry out their miserable plot, that, when at the last moment some shred and tatter of decency stopped them, they should glory in their sportsmanship-all this reads like a bad dream, like something impossible and unreal. It is as if they said, 'We planned to win by sticking a rake handle between Abraham's legs at the fifty-yard mark. It was a good scheme and it seemed sure to succeed. But at the crucial moment we didn't do it. This...
...quite escaped the cheering madness which makes savages discover in every stone an emblem, in every wind a god, imagined the unicorn, a strange single antlered creature which no one had ever seen, as a symbol for purity. It was a rare beast as well as one unreal; to capture the unicorn, one must first capture a virgin and induce her to sit still upon the ground. The unicorn, attracted by a purity akin to his own, might come and lay his shaggy, frightened head upon her lap. Then hunters might come up and kill him with their spears...
Even a savage knows that the world is a place of magic; he wonders what huge invisible hand draws the sun down into darkness, with what inaudible, dark charm a man is taken, suddenly and forever, out of the world, into an unreal place. This last trick puzzles even people who know just how all the others are accomplished. When someone dies whom they have known, they may go to witch-doctors called mediums who pretend that by saying hocus-pocus or by going into a trance, they can make dead people say things to people who are living. This...
There should be reasons why this is in spots the worst, and in others, one of the best plays come to Boston in some time. In the first place Mr. Kelly has caught an idea which has great dramatic possibilities. Though his plot may be totally unreal, it is possible, and in the main he is tenaciously faithful to it. The trouble is that he is no more able to handle a subject with the tragedic poetntialities belonging to this one, than is the present cast capable of creating the necessary stage illusion. It is case of a large, undigested...
Peaks of Destiny. So enormous are the powdered peaks of the Alps, so wild and casual the winds that sweep between them that the actions of people must seem in comparison fragile and inconsequent, even unreal. The people in this picture are mainly three; Diotina, a dancer, whose amorous flippancies stir her fiance to jealousy as they stir his young friend to devotion. The fiance traps his friend on a high and dangerous ledge; then, at the instant of carrying out his plan, he regrets it and clings to a rope through a night of storm until men arrive...