Word: worm
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Truly comic characters appear onstage about as often as there is a lunar eclipse. That is what makes the arrival of Norman, the pint-sized anarchist of Alan Ayckbourn's trilogy, an occasion of happy terror. The most satisfying laughs are those induced by determined worms, and Norman is an Attila of the worm world...
...turn of the century, hucksters sold worm syrup and other nostrums to cure everything from rheumatism to cirrhosis. Back in 1908, the government succeeded in banning a headache remedy containing a toxic acid and bearing the beguiling name of Cuforhedake-Brane-Fude. The Food and Drug Administration, which was formally established in 1931, has stamped out such gross quackery. But now many concerned scientists are beginning to wonder whether the FDA has become so cautious in its repression of quack cures and unsafe medicines that it is in some danger of stamping out or at least slowing the development...
Such problems are doubly disappointing because Kazan has tackled a subject on which he qualifies as an expert: actors. Sonny, 54, broke into Broadway as the understudy for Sidney Castleman (né Schlossberg), a much bellied matinee idol 20 years his senior. Now the worm has turned. Castleman is on the skids, sponging off Sonny while sneering at him as a "mechanical rabbit," a thespian technocrat devoid of true passion. To top it all, Castleman involves Sonny in a gang war between black hoodlums and a Polish mobster. But Sonny simply loves the old gaffer all the more...
...Democrats don't think much of these people, but from Richard Daley on down they evidently feel that along with blacks and women they're needed to capture elections, and maybe that they're easily cajoled into doing so: "Let's go fishing," said Brecht's angler to the worm...
...want nothing but his love and sympathy, and he won't give it me; and all my pride is trampled in the mud; I am nothing but a miserable crushed worm, whom no one wants, whom no one loves, a useless creature with morning sickness and a big belly, two rotten teeth, and a bad temper, a battered sense of dignity, and a love which no one wants and which nearly drives me insane...