Word: heroics
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Fight. During the unrestrained violence of the dinner-table combat between Anne and Patty, the play reaches its peak-in one of the most nerve-shattering scenes ever acted on Broadway. Ordering the Kellers out of the room, Annie flails into the heroic task of teaching wild young Helen the rudiments of table manners. Food and silverware explode across the room. Little Helen rushes to the door to pound out a plea for freedom. Annie promptly wrestles her back to her seat. Again and again and again, the child escapes and is captured. Again and again, Annie meets the near...
...While "high tragedy requires an heroic alternative rejected," pathos emerges from a feeling that no alternatives exist. To say that "God is dead," as Nietzsche did, is tragic, because if He were alive He could save us. But to declare that God is absent is a "weary dismissal of all alternatives...
...brilliant, cynical, romantic wreck, and his life a brief, inglorious skidmark to the edge of eternity. According to this picture, he was a great, misunderstood man who was driven to drink by outrageous fortune, but just before his death he experienced a transfiguration in which the heroic drunk and the dissolving genius were transformed and redeemed in a last great love. The notion is so silly that not even the moviemakers could convince themselves it was true. Scarcely a line in Sy (The Big Country) Bartlett's script rings true, and some of them are almost ridiculously false...
When a play centers around the impotence of giants and their helplessness at the hands of destiny and trivial accident, the presence of some few gaints onstage is essential. Lawrence Channing, as the Hector determined to avert the Trojan War, never manages to achieve heroic stature. In his initial appearance, returning victorious from a two-bit war, he bounds onstage like a ten-year-old running to mother and bestows on Andromache a puerile peck. He does sometimes, however, rise from his adolescent manner to the posture of a warrior. His oration to the dead on the closing...
...Edith's cook. So Lady Edith, who runs an orphanage near Bihar, India, delegates the job of python stalking to a half-Indian, half-American Quaker youth named Peter Bruff. Though courageous, Peter is an abstracted, mystical young man. He is also a poet, and his work, a heroic poem about the god Krishna, is going badly; he has caught the eye of a lustful Tibetan woman, who keeps luring him to her hut. A proper abnegation of the senses has become impossible; not once, he reflects mournfully, has he succeeded in thinking of Nothing...