Word: wasps
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...then-taboo issues of racism, xenophobia, unwed mothers and exploitation of the lower classes, to name just a few of the topics sung about onstage, are brought up with a bit of cliche, but are tackled with honest zeal nonetheless. The plot revolves around three families--one upper-class WASP, one black and one immigrant Jewish--who are striving for success and happiness in turn-of-the-century America, which is offering them as much adversity as it is opportunity...
...poop deck full of problems. He's trying to hide a Japanese girlfriend from his stuffy family back home. His roommate is being blackmailed into passing military secrets. The tart wife of his commanding officer is putting moves on him. Gurney, the prolific chronicler of Wasp life (The Dining Room, Love Letters), seems a bit out of his depth in this plotty drama, which raises (but doesn't grapple with) issues ranging from homosexuality in the military to the origins of Vietnam. But the compact grace of his writing and Daniel Sullivan's delicate direction make it a diverting reminder...
...early years of this century. These were people who felt themselves and the future of their children threatened. In Britain members of the upper middle class feared they would be swamped and taxed to extinction by the profligate overbreeding of the lower orders. In the U.S., members of the Wasp ascendancy looked with dismay at the flood of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Italians! Poles! What was the country coming...
...built the conglomerates were vastly different from the reigning generation of bosses. They were classic outsiders--non-Eastern, non-American, non-Wasp and non-Ivy. Rebels such as James Ling, founder of Ling-Temco-Vought, Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western Industries (satirized as Engulf & Devour) and Harold Geneen of International Telephone and Telegraph stormed America's corporate towers even as students and protesters were laying siege to the nation's ivory towers...
...watching the 45-year-old second son of the former President become the front runner in this year's gubernatorial race, Bush seems so different, so much softer around the edges. To help save his family, Bush recently made perhaps the ultimate leap for the son of the ultimate Wasp: he converted to Catholicism. It wasn't entirely an alien experience. Bush has been accompanying his wife to church off and on since their 1974 marriage, and many observers had erroneously concluded that he had already adopted her religion. But it happened only three years ago, and while some critics...