Word: wordplays
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...rest is all more of what Cheever has done well for years. His Sentences remain gently illuminated gems of language, uncomplicated by any wordplay and unfailingly rhythmic. He controls the pace masterfully, whether guiding the action over a cascade of toxic wastes or through a freshet of afternoon passion. And he can toss in a wisecrack at any moment. Running into his friend Eduardo the elevator man sometime subsequent to their tryst. Sears remarks. "We've got to find something else we can do together...Do you like to fish' Would you like to go fishing...
...devil's advocacy that such an investigation demands. The result is a book of pulled punches. The book's title comes from Stalin's famous reply, when told of the pope's likely opposition to a Soviet move: "How many divisions has the pope?" With a bit of clever wordplay, Nichols seems intent on making it mean not only the pope's military divisions, but his moral and spiritual divisions as well. Ironically, however, the divisions that the book succeeds in pointing out best are merely the author...