Word: harsh
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...curtain rose on a heath full of shaggy, diabolical hags hurling harsh-mouthed imprecations into the night. Their wild language was a witches' brew of medieval Bavarian dialect, laced with great lumps of Latin and Greek; in the background, no fewer than 20 different percussion instruments fired the cauldron with a tingling, thwunking cacophony. Anyone wandering into Stuttgart's Opera House last week would have quickly recognized, in both words and music, the style of Germany's most highly regarded living composer, Carl (Carmina Burana) Orff, 65. Less obviously, the dark, demonic and shatteringly effective scene...
...that is left undone in working to achieve a great objective and then is too badly managed to achieve it. For O'Casey, even in 1926, there was still real use in crying over spilt blood. But, never gnawing a thesis, he made his tragedy vibrate with harsh humor and pulse with humanity...
Declaring that the time had come "to start saying harsh things," Stone charged that the United States can no longer prevent Cuban efforts to introduce needed agrarian reforms, as it has on "three great occasions" in the past. "In 1933, in particular," Stone continued, "We pulled off about as unneighborly a job as any in our history...
...recently published memoirs, My Mission to My Country, the Shah criticized his own upbringing as too harsh and promised that he would give his son a democratic education. But as long as the Shah hangs onto his throne, the boy will not escape the trappings of royalty. Some time within a year or so, when the Shah celebrates his own much delayed coronation, young Prince Reza Cyrus will be perched atop his father's knee on the Peacock Throne...
What is most rewarding and least nine-teenish about A Taste of Honey is its un-histrionic realism, which blinks at nothing but can be wry as well as harsh, can use sunlight to make soot the more visible, and can blend a knack for theater with a sense of truth. With its misfits and misfortunes, all too much of the play could have turned sentimental; only here and there is it a little so. Even more, it could have turned sensational, but bold black words like Illegitimacy and Homosexuality and Miscegenation boil down into what is in the world...