Word: verbalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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French Playwright Anouilh has too often been dismissed as a kind of verbal dandy. Yet his underlying vision of life is dark and inconsolable. Anouilh's characters suffer with a quip on their lips while stretched on a rack that is the distance between the way things are and the way they want them to be. Anouilh is not interested in either ex posing or extolling his characters. He simply wants to catch them, and the audience, in the cruel toils of the human situation, masked, as it always is, with deceptive everyday smiles. Of The Rehearsal...
Ships & Caesars. Manna is adept at verbal slapstick. He is the fellow who created in the night boites of Cocoa Beach the astronaut who refused to be blasted off until his missing crayons were found. In another routine, he lands the first men on the moon-with such a jolt that their trousers fall down. He has some good one-liners. "I don't talk about Liz Taylor because some day it will be my turn," he says. He also notes that he never talks about his wife because "what's done is done...
Then Cleveland Indian Pitcher Gary Bell grazed the middle of Yankee Joe Pepitone. Pepitone trotted down to first base, but a hot verbal exchange with Bell sent him running out to the mound, and the dugouts boiled over. The field jammed spectacularly, but like the American League race, it was all show and not much action. Push a bit, swing a bit, yell a bit and it was over: Bell was fined $50 for deliberately throwing at the batter, Pepitone was accused of incitement to riot and later fined $50, but the Yankees won as usual, and the runaway...
Robert Lanchester attains no minor milestone. In Little Me Sid Caesar created a six distinct comic roles. Lanchester goes one step further--he creates six indistinct ones. On several occasions, though, he is very funny to watch as he combines verbal and visual dexterity. He makes the Shakespearian buffoon, Tedious, into a physically contorted Elizabethan-pretzel...
Levin is partial to the kind of playful verbal humor which Eugene Ionesco used brilliantly in The Bald Soprano. Sometimes the dialogue falls flat: "I was trying to catch a fly." "Why?" "Why? Would you have me catch a cold instead?" But more often it is mildly amusing, as when one of the men logically demonstrates that the tree is not a tree. The funniest moment in the play, though, is not verbal at all; it comes when the other man is unable...