Word: vapidly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rudeness simply enhanced Falwell's poised image, and the preacher easily glided through the thicket of questions. When he had arguments ready, he used them. When stumped--us he was by a query asking why he opposes abortion but favors the death penalty--he resorted smoothly to his usual vapid rhetoric ("I want everybody to have the benefits of pluralism.") It was, on the whole, a silly evening...
Meanwhile, Clarisse's husband is enduring an emotionless affair with a vapid starlet, while the sensual diva leads on a young gigolo who ultimately kills himself over his love for her. The subplots enthrall, but all fade away as Clarisse's and Julien's love reaches its promising resolution...
...current Three Sisters, a production by Rumanian Director Andrei Serban that transforms the customarily lugubrious Chekhov portrait of a doomed family into a knock about farce. Actors pout like children on a stage strewn with Producer toys. Earnest philosophizing about suffering and social evolution is played as vapid bourgeois chitchat. The fondest wish of the Prozorov sisters - to return to the gaiety of Moscow - is voiced as a giggling endearment to a baby. Yet the essence of the play is conveyed with antic energy and force. Serban adroitly manages a welter of themes: aimless ambition, futile romance, grotesque distortions...
...Giant. Her every movement, including her stiff posture and constantly flickering tongue, make Mona a treacherously attractive woman. Her self-conscious motions and carefully modulated voice reveal a delicately constructed character who could never face the brutality of the external world and is forced to wither away in the vapid small town. Dennis brings this crazed woman's self-proclaimed role as the mother of Dean's illegitimate son into perspective; she has no other reason for living except for the attention she has received for her son Jimmy Dean--who she maintains is an imbecile...
...APPENDIX" to Phyllis Keller's book on the Core Curriculum evokes a laugh--a laugh born of the shock of recognition. Sure enough, there in the unmistakable typeface and format of the Course Catalogue is "a partial listing of Core courses" (last year's). The Big Book's vapid generalizations and inimitable manner of description are here preserved for all posterity, from "Literature and Arts A-11--Theater and Drama" to "Foreign Cultures 32--Political Doctrines and Society." Bound into the volume with them is the account--as seen by Phyllis Keller, associate dean of the Faculty for academic planning...