Word: wordplay
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...rest of today's popular culture forgotten: Star Wars-types titles and the Battlestar Galactica theme begin this film and, within minutes, E.T. appears in a pay phone booth. Those not in the eighteen to thirty age bracket will miss these reverential spoofs, but the puns and wordplay should be universally accessible. Three officers, names Over, Under and Done, involve themselves in the obvious ranking problems: was Under Over, or was Under over Done? And there are boundless throw-away lines: Ted is praised as "the real boss, the top banana, the head cheese...
Clever but virulent wordplay abounded. "I don't wanna be your lover--I just wanna be your victim," Elvis sputtered in his souped-up homage to whacking-off that he not-so-subtly dubbed "The Beat." And he bragged in "Lipstick Vogue," "Sometimes I almost feel...just like a human bein...
AFTER THREE AND A HALF HOURS of wildly tangled mistaken-identity games, comedy routines within routines, and intemperate Elizabethan wordplay, the salient emotion one takes away from the Harvard-Radcliffe Summer Theater's "Love's Labor's Lost" is surprise that the play is so good. No sooooo good--everything is relative, and it is doubtful that any theater company in the world could keep the parts of the melange of verbosity and near-interchangeable comic types from dragging--but far better than most directors who attempt the play would attest...
...obvious reason's, the challenge is not confronted all that often. The few companies that tackle it usually resort either to theater-as-carnival-spectacle (bolstering the endless wordplay with sight gags, the traditional devices with slapstick), to avant-grade-extremism, or to massive cutting. The summer loebies have tried a little of all three, but director Gregg Lachow applies the experimentation with a temperate hand. His greatest accomplishment is leaving the staging simple enough so that the occasional striking line has room to breathe, and the play's fascinating structure emerges from its weight of words. In so doing...
...past the author has strained to pack too many ironic asides to the paragraph. In Nobody's Angel he allows some breathing space between wordplay. Unfortunately, a powerful sense of place and character is not sufficient to sustain an entire novel. The hero's sentimental nihilism and unfulfilled longings undo the hard work that has gone before, and the final epiphany-the revelation that there is no revelation-is too dim to illuminate Nobody's Angel. McGuane has not so much made the Old West new as buried many of the romantic myths under a modern veneer...