Word: wesker
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Roots (by Arnold Wesker) is the first play by this much-heralded "angry" young English playwright to reach New York. But if all too social-minded. Roots is in tone-except dismayingly at the end -far from angry; it might qualify, in fact, as the flattest-voiced play of the season. This is part of its meaning: it concerns the return of a young girl living in London to her farm-worker family -set, ignorant, mean-souled people given to drab gossip and barnyard jokes. The girl, having gained wider horizons through a self-educated Socialist boy friend, vainly hymns...
...Wesker uses a slice-of-life technique to convey a slice of lifelessness. Small, dun-colored, repetitious detail is ladled out till the audience is saturated in it. There is a certain mild humor in the repetitions, whether of the family's deadness or the offstage boy friend's didactic, doctrinaire lust for life. The humor turns grim when he rejects the girl, herself now lost between two worlds, too low for a hawk and too high for a buzzard. An honest but limited method, Wesker's leads to truthful but limited effects, and to believable characters...