Word: wizard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Twain and Enrico Caruso before capturing Flo Ziegfeld as her husband. Her fame came from her skill as a comedienne in the years after 1930, when she appeared as a flibbertigibbet in scores of plays (Her Master's Voice, Mrs. January and Mr. X) and movies (Topper, The Wizard of Oz, Hi Diddle Diddle). "Oh," she once wrote, "that sad and bewildering moment when you are no longer the cherished darling, but must turn the corner and try to be funny...
PETER LUKE'S Hadrian VII is a mediocre play with one outstanding central character. Structured like The Wizard of Oz, with a plot line that could have been borrowed from Putney Swope, this comic fantasy has more possibilites as soliloquy than as drama. Frederick William Rolfe, English recluse and neurotic who imagines himself Pope, has dreams more concrete than Dorothy's and ambitions no less earthshaking than Swope's. In treating the complex syndromes of Rolfe, playwright Luke has sidestepped the Putney-Swope assumption that what is sick must be funny: the Oz alternative (what is sick should be taken...
...opening scene of the play, creaky and oldfashioned, establishes Rolfe's "identity" like the opening shots of Kansas in The Wizard of Oz; then, we enter a dream-world. The central characters in Rolfe's real life (his creditors, his landlady, his crude Irish friend, the tottery old scrubwoman Agnes) become suddenly transformed by his fantastic vainglory. There must have been some malice in Dorothy's transformation of her favorite farmhands into a scarecrow, a tinman and a lion. Similarly, Rolfe as Pope Hadrian VII can launch heroic reforms in the Church, patronize innocent Agnes with her pickled onions...
There's only one hope left: the Witch Oenothea, who in a trade-off with a wizard long ago ended up with fire between her legs. And it's real fire too, because Fellini shows us a scene in which a long line of foolish-looking peasants wait with unlit torches at Oenotheas's bed. When their time comes, each devoutly places his torch between her legs to her sex, and "Poof." It is as if Fellini cannot bear to let us imagine anything. Anyway, Encolpius goes to Oenothea, and she "lights his fire," as it were, and he walks...
...Nasser is a wizard at inventing phrases. I think the war of attrition is his fourth, fifth or sixth slogan. When he came up with it, people really were occupied with what was going to happen and how we were going to cope with this type of war. Now we can say without boasting that we have presented an answer. I am quite sure that Egypt suffers from this more than Israel. In Israel from time to time you hear the question "What is to be?" I think the Egyptians should ask themselves not only "What...