Word: witness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...diagnosed as having the disease, and a former lover (Jonathan Hadary) who takes him back "as is" to nurse him. During the play's earlier off-Broadway run, Hadary played the lover as a near saint, but has now toned down the sanctimony and emphasizes the character's wit. Hogan must storm through the show on a single note approaching hysteria. Yet he manages to find great variety, shading and humor in the role, and delivers the most powerful performance of the Broadway season...
Despite Mountbatten's massive size, the evenhanded narrative moves with enormous grace and wit. This affectionate character study of a nearly extinct species can also be read as a fascinating gloss on World War II, or as a social history of wealth and privilege in decline. It was privilege, in the end, that killed Mountbatten. His habit over the decades was to spend his summers at Classiebawn Castle, an elegant old pile he owned in the Republic of Ireland. It will stand as one of history's sad ironies that Mountbatten had never taken part in the dispute over...
...pays a high price for success, except Eliot, who pays for his failures. To compare The Class with The Group, Mary McCarthy's 1963 best seller of eight Vassar girls and how they grew, is to measure the change in public taste. McCarthy treated her Ivy maidens with defoliating wit; Segal bastes his Harvard yardbirds with sophomore-level prose: "The athletic season culminated with the many confrontations against Yale" and "While it was arguable that his interpretation of the complete Beethoven piano concerti was the best thing put on disk during the previous twelve months, it was indisputable that...
...allow things to get stuffy in an unfunny way. The rahther heavy English accents and the constant over-acting are initially acceptable, but as the play wears on the over-acting wears thin and the over-Oxbridge intonations make Coward's dry witticisms positively and Coward's eternally fresh wit is enough to sustain interest, but one almost wishes a kid from Brooklyn would wander in for a change of pace. Something more in the way of contrast is needed; Lisa Peers, as the straightforward cockney maid, comes close to fitting the bill...
...picture. Trillin is a funny guy. He is a political Woody Allen, a populist at heart who sees foolishness teamed with greed and punctures the pomposities of that combination with more wit than any writer around today...