Word: intercutting
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Dates: during 1981-1981
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...should have been a silent movie. Facts and faces flicker through E.L. Doctorow's novel with the speed and power of jerky images from a newsreel of the American soul circa 1910. Archetypes are intercut with tintypes; a panorama of mass or class dissolves into a closeup of an agitated bourgeois mind; fable is superimposed on history. And they all run like hell to the D.W. Griffith finish line. Long shot: Harry Houdini performs thrilling escapes, restaging his own birth trauma for a country just then emerging from isolationism into imperialism. Closeup: Emma Goldman, anarchist spellbinder, woos Evelyn Nesbit...
...first scene in Part I, in which members of the audience are handed tasty scones, courtesy of the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin (and Crumpet) & Punctual Delivery Company, to the emotionally devastating finale of Part II, a riot of incident fills every corner of the stage. Dialogue scenes are intercut: one pair of actors converses, then falls silent as another, perhaps standing between them, provides exposition on the same subject. The actors coalesce to form an encroaching wall of bodies, the blinking façade of a rich man's house, a Hydrahead of starving Londoners, an aristocrat's carriage (complete...