Word: eared
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...fight and how to swear"-and then demonstrates just how poorly he learned at least one of those lessons as he expectorates a stream of hilariously garbled obscenities. A Saigon prostitute, blinking and cooing like a neon China doll, whispers rote nothings into our hero's ear; he thinks she's talking politics. A combat photographer boasts of the limbs he has lost in action and lures the reporter into the fray. "These flights are ab-stract!" he exults as the bomber tails into its fatal dive...
...never seen yoked together. The ancestor of this idea is the film director's voice-over: "It's theater about the way you think. When you think, there's about the way you think. When you think, there's a voice in your head, like someone speaking in your ear, and then there are abstract images." In a Breuer production, then, the actors, directors, scene designers and microphones conspire to transform the inside of the theater into the inside of a human head...
...almost subliminal improvement in the moral atmosphere. No more candidates hagiographically displayed, saints mixing radiantly with the adoring throng; no more of those sarcastic prosecutorial voice-overs about the other guy, the pitchman's tone as low and urgent and insinuating as a whisper of Cassius in the ear. No more that tussling, scuffling sound of the reluctant national psyche being dragged on a leash toward a booth with curtains and a lever...
...play trips down a path paved with jokes on foreign phrases, sight gags with panties, and tongue-twisting lists of pub names. Stoppard's ear for the curious-sounding proper noun is responsible for many of Dirty Linen's laughs; but between this dependence on the odd British name and the peculiarly British obsession with both perpetrating and denouncing scandalous activity, the play poses special difficulties for American performers. The Winthrop cast meets its challenge with modest skill, and no pretense of doing anything more than presenting a funny play. The script plasters over its mediocre theme with superficially brilliant...
...battleship, where Miss Kent succumbs to sea-sickness. And of course Ruby has to fall in love along the way; one of those shore-leave sailors who always stroll along Broadway (Web Stone) appears just as she faints from hunger to catch her and croon in her ear, "It's not Greta Garbo, it's not Jean Harlow, it's you, it's you." She regains consciousness in time to join him in a charming duet. Zachos and Stone both sing exquisitely and act almost as well--stagily and mannered, just the way they should...