Word: vacuously
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...which his studies have strongly qualified him to write, to his "Whig theory" of writing history in terms of the present. The view that Smith symbolized the high-water mark of Catholic political hopes may be correct; so may be the view that he was double-crossed by a vacuous F.D.R. But if these conclusions were valid they would stand more firmly on a better research and more detailed history, and one which did not announce its main object as a modern political problem. Smith's defeat came thirty years ago, and while it bears much relevance for Kennedy...
...Novak's vacuous eyes, her custard-bowl face: what Harry Cohn hath wrought! C. W. NELSON...