Word: wit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sadly, despite its insightful exploration of terminal illness and all its repercussions, Wit cannot offer a solution, a cure. Dr. Bearing informs us two minutes into the play that she will ultimately die. Perhaps an answer to some of the dilemmas appears in the John Donne sonnets that provide Dr. Bearing with a coping mechanism for cancer. A comma is the only punctuation separating life from death in the verses of Donne. There is no conclusive period, no exclamation point separating the two juxtaposed thoughts; only a simple, smooth transitional comma. Of course, cancer is not the simplest or smoothest...
...Passage to Juneau is intelligently written, with plenty of dry wit and humor as well as some reflective thoughts about nature and its inhabitants. The novel is not an account of an adventure at sea; instead, Raban finds his subjects in the past and in isolated towns. Although the novel is subtitled The Sea and Its Meaning, the waters of Alaska are largely peripheral to Raban's voyage of self-discovery...
...times, Parker's verbal wit is the match that lights otherwise dull embers. Measuring Niagara with a Teaspoon, benefits greatly from her title and written explication--"Georgian silver spoon drawn to the height of Niagara Falls." Likewise, Measuring Liberty with a Dollar, made of a silver dollar drawn into a wire the height of the Statue of Liberty, is not primarily a visual experience. If we didn't have Parker's clever titles and explanations, one work might easily be cast aside as a messy tangle of wire, while the other, neatly coiled, has only some nice, simple formal qualities...
...best of Parker's work, like "Room for Margins," depend on such effective combinations of the visual and the narrative aspects of her art. The most memorable have as much visual as verbal wit, and can stand alone without the extra information, the story, imparted by the caption. A visit to a firearm factory yielded two Colt 45 revolvers, arrested mid-production and polished, so that they look soft and immature, almost harmless. Visually, the pair of handguns look like two Nefertitis moving in for a kiss...
...After the Restoration, the Comedy of Manners took over as the dominant form of drama, so theater began to focus more on language and wit and there was less brute physicality. Think about the precursors to the Oscar Wilde-type play, where it's all about the aristocracy sitting around pontificating about how wealthy and bored they are. Throw some torture in there and it just wouldn't work...