Word: wars
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ennui, a churchgoer reads "Hustler" during a service Bethany attends), but never do they lead to God-bashing. You see, Smith doesn't satirize God, per se--he satirizes the inadequate human perception of God. Our quest to interpret the will of the divine has lead humans to murder, war, persecution, suspicion, and a bevy of other moral wrongs. The funny (and much less extreme) situation that Smith uses pictures one Cardinal Glick (George Carlin) unveiling a less then admirable rendering of their Savior to promote his "Catholicism WOW!" campaign: The depressing crucifix has been transformed into a "Buddy Jesus...
...little boy's experience in Nazi-occupied Germany--which constitutes the first part of the play--and wrote the second half herself. That Day tackles the experience of two parallel families, one in France and the other in Germany, who for some unclear reason are suffering from World War...
...families are suffering, why the French family is forced to leave its hometown and abandon their child. Who are these families? Are they Jewish? Are they resistance fighters? The director leaves important concrete details out of the picture on purpose--to assert the universality of the harm that World War II caused? Everybody already knows the war is bad, so what does this play do that's new? Part of the reason for the ambiguity, at least in the first part, is that the play is from the little boy's point of view. We hear his thoughts over...
...Although this play puts a rather original twist on the experience of the war, it lacks much in its execution. The blocking is overdone-- there is a constant cycle of walking back and forth and sitting down and getting up that detracts from the action of the play. There are several scenes in which nothing really happens except that the characters circle around the stage and come back to where they started. Lengthy pauses are another shortcoming. There is one point in which some Nazi guards stand in front of a bench for about five minutes without a single word...
...some redeeming qualities. The props and especially the costumes are delightful. One real window hangs in the middle of the stage. This window is used by both families, and links them in a way. Both families have only a glass window to protect them from the forces of the war; both mothers wave goodbye to their sons from this window. It stands as a symbol of the common human suffering behind the war...