Word: wasps
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Bech Is Back concerns an obverse, almost perverse antiself. Henry Bech is Jewish; John Updike is Wasp. Bech suffers from a 13-year-old writer's block. Updike averages a book a year. Bech is an unathletic urbanite. Updike is an enthusiastic sportsman and a countryman. Once these disparities have been marked, the author is free to play with words, with personae, even with whole nations...
...thought the notion of New York as Fun City died with the Lindsay administration? No such thing. In A Little Sex, Manhattan is still where a coupla crazy kids can get their Wasp jollies while jogging through Central Park, skateboarding past the Chrysler Building and making love in an apartment the size of the Metropolitan Museum's Egyptian wing. He (Tim Matheson) is a young Mad Ave. careerist. She (Kate Capshaw, whose resemblance to both Julie Christie and Diane Keaton makes her odds-on favorite as Warren Beatty's next costar) teaches at a girls' private school...
...tends to at this time of year, turned to politics...") Davis has a terrific feel for the mechanics of social rituals and hierarchies, and the best of Hometown uncovers a city only an insider could know. He tells of a widely believed rumor linking the handsome, popular WASP mayor to the socially prominent wife of a close Jewish friend; the "social marketplace" of Hamilton, a beauty shop frequented by women of diverse backgrounds; and, finally in the book's dramatic conclusion, the trial of a popular music teacher for masturbating in a department store bathroom...
Almost never does a U.S. playwright deal with bloodlines, class lines and cultural totems and taboos. That is what makes A.R. Gurney Jr.'s drama something of a novelty. It is not a play, properly speaking, but a series of vignettes, almost like revue sketches, set in Northeastern Wasp territory, where the inhabitants go to Ivy League schools, often possess inherited wealth and hold their opinions in their obdurate spines...
...Dining Room might be subtitled The Decline of the Wasp, except that it is clear-eyed, touching and buoyantly funny. The stage set itself is something of an anachronism with its Sheraton table, Hepplewhite chairs and dour ancestral portraits. The time span is from the Depression to the present. The dining room used to be the site of unalterable tribal rites-Thanksgiving, Christmas, family fiscal confabulations. Now people eat in the kitchen...