Word: witting
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...Duck. But the punchlines are too facile (man to lemming: only thing I don't understand about you lemmings is why you run to the sea and drown yourselves. Lemming to man: and the thing I don't understand about you men is why you don't) and the wit occasionally succumbs to Richard Goldfarb's erratic direction...
Thurber is a classic American wit, and if this production works it is because of his writing. Like his stories it is flawed and evasive, but who can resist the disarming deviance of the little woman who smiles blandly at the audience and says "I never dreamed their union had been blessed with issue till their daughter stabbed the superintendent of schools...
Shirley Knight, as the failed sex symbol, is favored with Patrick's most successful character, her speeches filled with wit and wordplay. Knight speaks rhythmically, very sexually, building up to a climax and descending with a crash. Clive Donner also directs well, maintaining control during the more histrionic moments. Under his direction, physical movements augment the script and rescue the show from tedium...
More seriously, Visconti forsakes the wit of the opening for a kind of tongue-tied general valedictory. He is interested not so much in exposing his characters as having the Professor embrace all of them, opening his arms to their indulgences and sanctioning their moral impotence. "You could be my family," the Professor tells them all almost longingly, weighing his cloistered life against their wasted ones and finding that his own is wanting. For both Visconti and his protagonist, it is the conclusion of a numb and desperate...
...much of their act isn't really improvised at all. If they're any good, in fact, the framework within which they improvise is probably pretty carefully and completely worked out. The first time I saw the Proposition, almost five years ago, I was amazed at their inventiveness and wit. How can they do it? I kept asking myself. By the sixth time I knew...