Word: wildernesses
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...press and made a speech that was interrupted four times by a heckler. The Secretary paused and commented patiently, "I think I have some of my Harvard students here," and from then on owned the appreciative audience. His charm worked equally well on six-year-old Beth Wilder. When she held up her autograph book to him, Kissinger, spoofing his own legendary ego, asked hopefully, "Am I the first?"-and effectively mimed disappointment when she said...
...strict about who their heroes and villains are and what values are being knocked around. There is substance in laughing at their films because the tricks played have moral meaning. Chaplin's imitation is funny, Groucho's anti-establishment pranks on hotel-managers and rich matrons are funny. Gene Wilder's charicature of Dr. Frankenstein is funny; the audience cheers them on. Jack Nicholson dumping the heiress in a birdbath is discomfiting because she's nice and he's a slimy creep. The indignity should be the other way around...
...winning way of putting over his occasional aphorisms, such as. "Wherever you come near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense." Or the notion put forth in a couple of passages near the start of Shaw's book-length preface to Misalliance, which Wilder, having the Stage Manager attribute it to "one of those European fellas," distills into an epigram. "Every child born into the world is nature's attempt to make a perfect human being...
...handling of the drugstore scene, in which Emily is ill-at-ease and nervously kneads her fingers. It is to the demands of the final act that she does not fully rise. This is the rainy cemetery scene in which the dead articulate their thoughts (an idea Wilder got from the early cantos of Dante's Purgatorio) and Emily returns from the dead to relive her twelfth birthday (a device Wilder had already tried in his novel The Woman of Andros). Here Miss Mulgrew fails to evince the intensity and luminosity that better actresses have managed to summon...
John Glover understands the nature of Simon Stinson, the church organist, who amusingly overdoes his final consonants to remind his chair members how to enunciate their hymn texts. Stinson is also the town drunk, and his pack of troubles eventually drives him to suicide. Wilder quietly makes a strong point by not only including him among all the other decreased townfolk in Act III but by placing him in the front row of the dead. The handling of the other minor roles ranges from adequate to capable. And Lawrence Casey's costumes nicely evoke the period covered, which is from...