Word: cartoonishly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...somebody who wants to tell everything -- every one of the heart's dirty little secrets -- to his coterie audience. At the core, these are high-gloss melodramas with high comedy along the edges. They move like Roger Rabbit on speed, and so do the horny, drug-hyped, tortured, ironic, cartoonish creatures of his imagination...
...script, The Cocktail Hour, is the same as the work onstage. The setting, "upstate New York," is plainly the native Buffalo of its author, A.R. Gurney (The Dining Room). Gurney's actual family has made little secret of its distaste for being portrayed in his work ever since his cartoonish Love in Buffalo was mounted at Yale School of Drama in 1958, while he was a student there. Yet the puckish hint of autobiography is only one of the charms of The Cocktail Hour, which opened off-Broadway last week...
...rouse the audience from their seats directly into a protest rally. The framing story is the trial of a brutal, ignorant police chief in rural Texas for the killing of a young Chicano suspected of burglary. Morton's other plays mingle reality and daffy fantasy, human characters and cartoonish stereotypes in order to teach -- or preach -- the Hispanic history of the Americas. Says he: "I've seen the glaring difference between the First World and the Third World, and it weighs heavy on my soul...
Turner is outstandingly insane as Bananas. Maintaining her last grip on reality, she stumbles about the set trying to sabotage Bunny's plans. Bunny, played to comically cartoonish proportions by Trachta, is so caught up in the world of movies that she hardly notices the world of reality. The juxtaposition of these two fine performances is absurdly wonderful, as when Bunny indignantly interrupts Bananas' comparison of electric shock therapy to a concentration camp oven to describe "Doris Day's Night of Terror," when the starlet couldn't find her curlers anywhere...
...fact, Mallon says he never intended to be realistic about things. He changed building and course names to suit his plot and intentionally made his characters "cartoonish." And he says he was amused when he visited his publisher's office and saw the copy editor use a map of Harvard to assure that the characters did not cross imaginary intersections...