Word: westons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...John Weston...
...members of the starving class," his wife maintains desperately. Ella plans to sell the house her lawyer friend and lover, Taylor, who wants to build a housing development. "Everyone wants a piece of land," he declares, "so pitch in and play ball, or you'll lose." Meanwhile, Weston has traded the house to the local tavern owner, a degenerate called Ellis, to pay his debts...
...SOMETHING in this family binds it together in its distress--a love beneath childlike dreams of baseball and airplanes, the roughhousing and wristwrestling. The "liquid dynamite" in Weston's veins flows for Wesley and Emma also, and they lash out furiously against the invaders threatening the simple foundation of their lives. The system must prevail, however, and in this big, barren land it often does so brutally...
...McDonough, as the battered but not broken Weston, commands the stage with more than the mere physical presence of his wiry frame. Weston can never keep his passion for living more than a shade below the surface, whether he's breaking down the door or erecting a new one to keep the world out, and McDonough provides this desperate vitality. When he repents his first act drunkenness (and his entrance in a garbage can, surely an inspired bit of dramatic symbolism) with typical quixotic fervor, the futility becomes only more apparent. He can rant and rave but never escape...
...first act, Weston awakens from a stupor alone on stage. Although he doesn't know it, the farmhouse is no longer his. He crosses to the refrigerator, opens it--empty--and squats silhouetted in the light from the great refrigerator God. A young lamb rests by the stove, brought there to recover from maggots, tempting Weston's hunger. The family is to be displaced by housing for families who presumably can afford to eat--a poignant irony for a farming and gambling man. For the system hurts you as often as it rewards you, and once...