Word: maides
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Miss Bingham's "Miss Thrush at Home" is a clear-cut, black and white depiction of character in the first person narrative of a hard, emotionless, bedridden old maid describing the end of a young woman's engagement. It gets to the point immediately, beginning with: "I am an old woman. I do not pretend to be anything else," and continues to the end hammering this fact home with relentless determination. Nowhere does Miss Thursh behave inconsistently, i.e., like a nice, ordinary human being. She keeps a card catalog on the emotional lives of the neighbors as her kind, simple...
...soloist: young Rufus Follet, who plays a lighthearted, vagrant air in counterpoint to the heavier orchestration. Death, to Rufus, is scarcely more complex than the other riddles flung at him each waking day-the nagging puzzle of why he should not speak about the black color of a Negro maid's skin; or why the older boys on their way to school solemnly ask his name and then go into fits of inexplicable laughter; or why a woman will suddenly become so very fat; or who is God. The boy's sense of loss is inextricably mixed with...
...characters evoking Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie, the play has also the three-pronged subject matter of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. An elderly, genteelly despotic Southern mother has badly hurt her daughter and her son-the daughter is an all-tied-up-in-knots old maid; the son a psychotically bitter, frustrated writer. The son has in turn badly hurt the simple girl (Anne Baxter) who twice, from sheer sexual compulsion, became his unhappy wife. Divorced now, he comes from a mental home to break in upon her romance with an uncomplicated architect. All the time, amid such...
...farce moments can be entertaining and brightly cockeyed. The old maid daughter (well played by Martine Bartlett) is both amusing and touching. The son's outbursts can have a mad-dog howl and bite. But so abruptly do things shift focus, so wildly do they change tone, that farce firecrackers negate real bullets, and virtues are turned into faults. Where, by a stylized atmosphere and a sardonic inflection, Waltz of the Toreadors could mate humor with horror, lace wormwood with Vichy. Square Root jangles with false notes. Where, again, Williams could make a dynamic-if uncentered-story...
...servants at Anastasia's home seemed unmoved at the news (although a maid did set the dogs on reporters), and Al's family decided not to ask the Roman Catholic Church to bury him (another brother, the Rev. Salvatore Anastasio, is a Bronx priest). He was put away quietly in a plain old $900 coffin-although another brother, Joe, got a $6,000 box when he passed on (of natural causes) last year, and $15,000 worth of flowers to boot...