Word: monologist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Gregory Mosher, director of the Lincoln Center Theater, cannot entirely recapture the liberating novelty that the first audiences found in Wilder's disdain for sets, props and other devices of illusion. But the production vividly evokes both his playful belittling of narrative and the irresistible appeal of his storytelling. Monologist Spalding Gray brings a feisty and brooding quality to the customarily benign stage manager: if his halfhearted attempts at a New Hampshire accent fail, the laughs he evokes are both frequent and authentic to the text. Film actors Eric Stoltz (Mask) and Penelope Ann Miller (Biloxi Blues) portray the young...
...takes nothing away from the filmmakers to say that most of the movie's confidence derives from Williams. He obviously knows that in Cronauer he has finally found a meaty role. At last, the great monologist gets to play -- a great monologist. Not that so bland a term suggests Adrian's full commitment to outrageous verbal behavior or the lunacy of his situation. The massing of troops as the war begins to escalate implies the massing of a hip new draftee audience, kids who need, among other things, the kind of radio fare they were used to back home...
...characters, and some actors found that a little troublesome," he admits. Ask John Goodman, whose portrayal of the earnestly romantic Louis Fyne is a memorable one, what he thinks about Byrne, and he will smile and say, "That man uses a different dictionary." Spalding Gray, the gifted monologist who appears as the civic leader of Virgil, notes that "David's a paradox. He's the most absent-present person I've ever met. He has two worlds going at the same time...
...book filled with such inveterate egotists as the Carver clan ought not to be much fun. Yet A Summons to Memphis radiates tolerant good humor. For all of Phillip's flaws, he is a keen observer, witty monologist and an adept at anecdotes. He recalls, for example, the fate of another old Memphis widower who attempted to take a second wife: "When Mr. Joel's intention to remarry was made manifest he was actually hauled into court by his own children. (His sons were all lawyers, unhappily for him.) And there in court . . . Mr. Joel's sons had their father...
...fact, what he called his old Oxford neighbor [J.R.R.] Tolkien (whose books he refused to read ...), a 'monologist.' He would listen to whatever anyone had to say-although when he was especially wrapped up in his work ... he could not always absorb the sense of what was said ... During this period he got as hopelessly absent-minded as he ever has been ... When he was doing chores he would be thinking about the work ... Once when laying the table he put down knife, fork and glass for [his character] Sergeant Lamb. He did not do this, however...