Word: wordplay
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...this play may be--what more winning combination--yet however lavish the praise it has garnered, a main part of this production's problems lie within the play itself. A full-scale production of it is simply too long. And even the much-touted tensile strength of its brilliant wordplay and verbosity cannot sustain such ceaseless action. Compounded with this intrinsic difficulty is director Jeff Melvoin's decision to present the play at a grinding, almost gesture-tableau pace. Muffled by the heavy directorial hand, ordered to understatement, most of the actors are left to gratuitous pouting and postured gestures...
...read Lewis Carroll or Evelyn Waugh. R & G is an actor's showcase, and if the eponymous reads are any good-you should laugh from the beginning until the surprisingly, tender conclusion. The play is about two characters in search of a language and contains the most brilliant wordplay on the English stage (always rich in wordplay) since Shakespeare or at least Wilde. The "Questions" scene ("None sequitur. Thirty love.") is alone worth the price of admission. At the Loeb mainstage tonight, tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday as well as next weekend...
...that they serve only as another vehicle for still more exercises of arcane wit. Nabokov aficionados will take pleasure in matching up these variant titles with the originals, or comparing, say, Vadim's precocious daughter with Nabokov's Lolita, but no real light is shed by the kind of wordplay that turns the real-life Camera Obscura into the fictional Camera Lucida, or by a stereotyped sketch of another Lolita...
Travesties' first act is full of the kind of wordplay, witty repartee and the name-dropping of ideas that has always been Stoppard's strength in the past. It's a lightweight world of drawing room comedy in which the foursome of Carr, Tzara and their English girl-friends gets itself confused with the foursome of Wilde's play. Tzara explains how he discovered the word "dada" and Joyce is good for a couple of show-stopping limericks, but things never get off the ground. Some of the minor characters are better drawn, such as Carr's butler, who oversees...
...polemics today, Aristotle might well find himself saying something like "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." There was never all that much wrong with Goldwater's famous formulation, except that in the climate of 1964 this wordplay was correctly understood as a winking endorsement of right-wing extremism...