Word: da
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...second and fifth lines must all rhyme, while the third and fourth follow another rhyme (a,a,b,b,a). There are 13 feet, or stressed syllables, to the limerick-no more, no less. The typical foot is an anapest, that is, two unstressed syllables preceding an accented one (da-da-DAH), or sometimes an iamb (da...
...most of his good lines seem like deadpanned straight lines. Only once is Brooks himself very funny--in a scene with Kahn in which they dress and speak like an old Yiddishe couple in order to get past security cops at an airport-"Vattaya tink, ve smuggle dope in da celery?" Significantly, this bit of shtick reflects Brooks's earlier days as a Jewish comedian. The voice he uses in that scene is the same one he used as the 2000-Year-Old Man back in 1960. For all his attempts to change his patter, Brooks has to revert...
Fuse these qualities at their apex and you get an O'Casey. Even a lesser Irish dramatist like Hugh Leonard can be uncommonly rewarding. Da, now at Manhattan's Hudson. Guild Theater, means dad. The play is a fencing match with the ghosts of the past. The blood drawn is palpably human, the wit, parried and thrust, strikes sparks of continuous and sometimes quite unexpected humor. Says the father in Da of his late wife: "She died an Irishwoman's death-drinking tea." The laughs crop up like that, not as explosions but implosions, deeply rooted...
...hero of Da is Charlie Now (Brian Murray), a middle-aged writer who has come back to his boyhood home near Dublin to bury his father and dispose of the old man's effects. As he begins stuffing faded letters and papers into the kitchen stove, who should shuffle in and plop into his favorite armchair but old Da himself (Barnard Hughes)? Only to be followed by Young Charlie (Richard Seer), Charlie's teen-age self; Mother (Sylvia O'Brien); and Drumm (Lester Rawlins), a dour early employer given to pungent maxims: "Marriage is the maximum loneliness...
Medals should be struck for all mem bers of the cast. As Da, Hughes is an expansive field marshal of lifelong defeat who acts with the authority of an uncaged lion. The ensemble surrounding him reminds one again that the richest single treasure of the U.S. stage may be its actors...