Word: idiotic
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Died. Bretaigne Windust, 54, Paris-born U.S. theater director who, with such other unknowns as Henry Fonda, James Stewart and Joshua Logan, helped start the University Players and hit the big time after he directed Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt in Robert Sherwood's Idiot's Delight (1936) and in Jean Giradoux's Amphitryon 38 (1937), went on -to stage Life with Father (1939), Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), Finian's Rainbow (1947), and The Great Sebastians (1956); in Manhattan...
Like Enemy, Tigers celebrates oddballs Author King has known. The title itself comes from a Zen Buddhist pal who always uttered "his senseless little orison" on leaving King's apartment. After three years, King exploded, "What is the meaning of this idiot prayer?" "Well," said the hurt friend, "have you been bothered by any tigers lately...
...John McClain had not enjoyed himself as much as all that. "I couldn't divorce myself from the fact that I was spending too much time with an idiot boy," he wrote. The play had been little more than "an overextension of a quite small idea." The practice of turning reviewers inside out is hardly exclusive to Broadway. Last week in London, the Daily Telegraph's exacting critic, W. A. Darlington, fumed over a sign outside the Strand Theater quoting him as urging the public: BY ALL MEANS GO AND SEE THIS PLAY. "If triviality is what...
...secret resentments against the old man rise to the level of passion. For the old man was a windy man of God, a self-proclaimed "prophet" who raised the boy to go into the world to preach the Word. He especially charged him to baptize his city cousin, an idiot child whose schoolteacher father is a sweaty atheist. At the thought of this mission, young Tarwater is torn. An inner voice tells him that the old man was a fool or worse. He gets drunk, sets fire to the house, where the old man is still sitting dead...
...baptizes his idiot cousin all right, but he deliberately drowns him in the process. Through the murder, Tarwater thinks that he has exorcised his great-uncle's injunction to preach and baptize. But back home the boy discovers that a Negro neighbor has rescued his uncle's body and given it Christian burial. He recalls the inner voice that had warned him against the compulsion to serve God: "You have to take hold and put temptation behind you. If you baptize once, you'll be doing it the rest of your life...