Word: wits
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Oscar Wilde was the epitome of the fin de siecle spirit and "The Importance of Being Earnest," first produced in 1895, is the epitome of Oscar Wilde. The pose of jaded cynicism and brittle sophistication thinly covers a high-spirited appreciation of the comic, and his wit, compounded of epigrammatic form and paradoxical and unconventional sentiments is, if less "shocking" today, still distinctive and sparkling...
...verbally it is a desperately worldly triangle story. Trying for sophistication, it is too proud for wisecracks but too poor for wit...
...Sandy") Patch, 55, defender of Guadalcanal, veteran tactician whose monument was his U.S. Seventh Army's "left hook" from the Riviera north around the Alps, south into Austria; of pneumonia; in San Antonio. A disciplinarian with "a temper like the devil before dawn," Sandy Patch also had deadpan wit and a soldier's knowledge of Kipling. A month before he died, he got the top job of his soldiering lifetime: architect-in-chief -of the postwar U.S. Army...
Rice intersperses the action with dramatizations of a number of Miss Field's daydreams during the course of 20 spring hours, using them as a clever satire on popular conceptions of American life, to wit: murder, prostitution, law courts, trips to Mexico and so forth. But the search by Miss Field for a man, her final choice, and her reasons for it are less skillfully handled. And those things are essentially what the play is about...
...carries the virtuosity of her role with a simplicity foreign to virtuoso performers. The result is a performance of distinction as well as of wit and brilliance...