Word: vapidly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Although the program claims that the play is "A New Comedy," there is only one amusing line all evening. That is delivered by a horse who, for some reason, wanders on stage. Coming at the end of a particularly vapid line by the leading man, Tom Helmore, it serves as a short, and probably unrehearsed, comment on proceedings. It was probably unrehearsed because the horse's timing was slightly off for best comic effect; but then he (or, perhaps, she) is not being paid Equity rates for a speaking part, and you can't get top talent for horsefeed...
...taking his last swings in a test match against Australia. He quits because his son, an arty young man who fancies himself a lyric poet, is mortified to tell Oxford classmates that his father is "in sport." After creaking through a whole series of domestic traumas, including a rather vapid romance between the cricketer and a barmaid, the story reaches its denouement with a testimonial to sports as the great leveler...
...first curtain soon batters that hope. The cast strides back and forth about the stage, tearing into marriage and cold pills--the two whipping boys of the plot. Actually, this discussion is inoffensive, the kind of vapid pleasantries you would expect to hear from likeable people bantering between themselves. It is nothing for 1,000 people to be eavesdropping on. When the hero's lady love absents herself saying she'll be gone an hour and will count the minutes, the hero rejoins, "There should be sixty." And so it goes...
...negative odor that puts it above Spades." There are people who love a country, and they find it stricken, and there is a girl whose love is wider than a country. It is good that the authoress loves the country of which she writes, but there is a vapid, too-plaintive air that distracts the sympathy of the reader. "If you were born in Israel, you were a sabra, tough and tan on the outside, sweating in the sun, your heart and lungs and everything crying out as you kissed the dust and the salty dirt and asked...
...only two of O'Neill's plays on stage, my judgment is incomplete, but originals seem rather dull. Although they contain plenty of action, bombast and strained dialogue shoot through the short dramas. The motion picture, however, centers attention on the action and minimizes the number of boring or vapid lines. As result, The Long Voyage Home, while still spotty, flows along with grace and often force...