Word: manned
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...late in the evening, Birrell's delight with life in Brazil was gone in a wave of man-without-a-country nostalgia, and his eyes were glistening. "I don't know what I'm a victim of," he said, "but I'm a victim all right...
...Tenth Man (by Paddy Chayefsky) is something not too frequent in the theater: a genuine theater piece. It at once draws on life and departs from it, and by means of visual and atmospheric effects, of fantasy laced with reality, of prayers interrupted with jokes, it creates its own heightened world. Part of Playwright Chayefsky's purpose in doing this is to cast light on the world of reality, to set up symbolisms, set speculation going. At this more complex level, The Tenth Man fails. But as a theater piece, well staged by Tyrone Guthrie and often well acted...
...scene is a shabby Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Mineola, L.I., and the tenth man is a young lawyer with no faith in religion, or even in life itself, who has been brought in off the street to make a quorum for morning prayers. Except for an aged rabbi, even the elderly Jews who show up largely lack faith; they come out of habit or boredom, or as to a club where they can gossip and wisecrack and argue various isms. One of them brings his 18-year-old granddaughter, a schizophrenic who has been in and out of asylums...
...what it juxtaposes and contrasts-chant and wisecrack, surrealism and photography, insanity and farce, demonology and Freud-The Tenth Man is telling and sharp. And Playwright Chayefsky has an equally good ear for the colloquial speech of his Jews as for their dialectical pomposities. But in spattering its theatrical vignettes with philosophic question marks, The Tenth Man takes on obligations it does not meet. Far from turning fantasy into vision, it fails to save it from sentimentality. Not only are all the play's characters uniformly nice, but exorcism seems a convenient miracle drug, and the happily vanishing young...
...stage door, Walker in a hash house or the Garden of Eden, also have their moments. But too often, though they make their lines brighter, they cannot make them bright. TV's Shelley Berman does nicely in a character-part telephone monologue, but falls flat as a straight man, and the rest of the show alternates dullness and noise when it does not combine them...