Word: woes
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Would that the two one-acters with which the house makes its debut showed similar qualities. Despite fitful laughter, both plays have a Cassandra complex. Their common theme has been constantly drummed in recent seasons-woe is me, woe is you, woe is America. Such plays are loaded with enough dolorous symbols to break the back of Melville's whale. To compound their disadvantages, both playwrights seem wedded to the fallacy that drama is some kind of nonstop talk show...
...they rather relish it. Muggings, burglaries, strikes and technological failures of all kinds form part of the daily news fare. A New Yorker would count the day lost if he could not regale an out-of-towner, or a friend, or himself, with some vivid tale of megalopolitan woe. The past master of this urban gallows humor is Neil Simon, and in The Prisoner of Second Avenue he has written his finest play since The Odd Couple...
...before I can retire," he told the committee. "I've had a heart attack and I don't know if I can last until then." Two Detroit machinists formerly employed by the Michigan Tool Co., Earl MacLeit and George Silver, told similar tales of woe. Each of them was laid off after more than three decades of steady work when Michigan Tool's parent company, ExCellO Corp., decided to move the Detroit operation to North Carolina. The men were not invited to relocate. Now they subsist on unemployment checks...
...changes in new models should be so novel and attractive as to create dissatisfaction with past models. Automobile design is not, of course, pure fashion, but the laws of Paris dressmakers have come to be a factor in the automobile industry. Woe to the company which ignores them...
...chancelleries the world over, China is making a prodigious effort to reassure its concerned friends. The weekly Peking Review has told the North Vietnamese that China is "your reliable rear area," crooned to Albania that "our hearts are closely linked," promised North Korea to "share weal and woe and fight to the end to defeat the common enemy." Last week at a Peking dinner for visiting Algerian Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika, China's Vice Premier Li Hsien-nien made an all-purpose pledge to "stand by the Algerian and other Asian, African and Latin American peoples and the revolutionary...