Word: lancelot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...early on that reviving the Arthurian opera may have unforeseen consequences, particularly for Arthur Cornish and his wife Maria, who is also on the foundation's board. Might these two well-meaning, influential and exemplary people be fated to suffer Maria's adultery with Arthur's best friend, a Lancelot in modern dress? No sooner is this suspicion raised than it begins to seem inevitable. Davies does not try to generate much suspense on this score; his interest lies in how the principals will react once the predestined has occurred and what they will learn from the unpleasant, archetypal experience...
...play's other actors try for less serious performances. Mike Gaw and Robert P. Chapski wryly exaggerate their cameos as Portia's unsuccessful suitors. Jeff Hobson is a nicely lecherous Lancelot Gobbo. Phil Fry squeezes the maximum comedic possibilities from his roles as servant Stephano and the blind Old Gobbo...
...greatest living Southern novelist. His canon is as solid as any contemporary American's, north or south of the Mason-Dixon. The Moviegoer, Percy's first and best novel, received the National Book Award in 1962 and the works that followed--The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, and The Second Coming--established a critical and commercial cult following that was, and is, highly deserved...
Three of Author Walker Percy's five previous novels bear titles with implications of apocalypse: The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins and The Second Coming. The other two, The Moviegoer and Lancelot, are exceptions in name only. For all of Percy's fiction revolves around a central question: can humane, civilized life survive this murderous, mechanized century? Details change from book to book, but a number of constants recur. The hero is typically a Southerner and a loner, a weirdo in the eyes of friends and relatives, whose despair at the decline of civilization has lured him into alcoholism...
...beyond the scrimmage line, as the best coaches know. San Francisco's Bill Walsh could make a serviceable quarterback out of an usher, but no one can be taught to lift a team the way Joe Montana raised the 49ers 55 days after back surgery. "Armies work hard for Lancelot," Guard Randy Cross says, "harder for King Arthur." At 38, oft- deposed Raider Jim Plunkett keeps coming back to reign in Los Angeles...