Word: vacuous
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Manhattan's Maynard Walker Gallery last week, gives persuasive answers to both questions. In it is a little girl, perhaps sent upstairs for an hour of penance, who dimly but fearfully perceives the end of her innocence. The picture has charm and-in the dark room, the vacuous expression-a touch of horror. Without luck's greatest blessings, the photographer who wanted to duplicate the painting would wait (for the clear light, for the tilt of the head) longer than it took the artist to learn to paint. And if the explicit drawing had been lost in abstractionist...
...little energy, and, of course, almost no technical skill in the Harvard performances that I have seen. Worst of all, there is a paucity of intellectual excitement. There is only a crashing parochialism that mistakes quantity and variety of productions, (many of them anti-theatre obscurities) produced in a vacuous atmosphere, for theatre. Imitations of faddish trends in approach to technique, or of some style vaguely suggestive of the British "Classic" style, only underscore the simple fact that there is no unifying point of view or style around here. Until Harvard does have its own style, its theatrical performances...
Farce From lonesco. The anger in Albee's The American Dream is less restrained, although the one-hour work begins as a sort of surrealistic situation comedy about a prosperous bourgeois family. The dialogue is a wildly hilarious melange of clichés, inanities and redundancies. Vacuous, tyrannical Mommy harangues intimidated, impotent Daddy, and both berate semi-senile Grandma, whom they threaten to send off to a nursing home. Then in comes a clubwoman who doesn't know who she is or why she is there. Says Mommy: "Won't you sit down, would you like...
...Vice-President's search for a platform has ended--but because it had to--and his troubles are by no means over yet. Every plank is a vacuous patching together of the divergent shreds within the Republican Party, and Nixon has not chosen to reinforce it with something like Al Smith's famous "wet telegram...