Word: phil
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...that Jonah or Adam and Eve were historical and that Jesus turned water into wine. Osing's views proved too much for his conservative parishioners. "The Lutheran Church has always been based on the Bible," explains Phil Beck, production manager of a local paint company and the church's Sunday-school superintendent. "If you start questioning it, where do you stop? If I have to have that much education to sit down and understand Genesis, then why did God ever let Luther put it in the people's language? At what point do I throw the whole mad mess...
...music has never been an easy profession for women. Recognition and glamour are common enough, but women looking for artistic control and financial leverage are usually thwarted. The Crystals and the Ronettes were high on the pop charts in the early '60s, but Phil Spector, multifaceted rock tycoon, wrote the lyrics, produced the records and pocketed most of the profits. In the '60s the men who sold pop music saw women as petulant screamers (Lesley Gore) or filigreed folkies (Judy Collins). Occasionally, women defied the image makers. Janis Joplin and Grace Slick escaped briefly from San Francisco psychedelia...
Alcoholic Despondency. Except for New York magazine's ever fastidious John Simon, aesthetic outrage alone rarely elicits such exacerbated responses. The truth is that Mert and Phil abrasively tweaks raw nerves. Mert (Estelle Parsons) is well into middle age and has recently had one cancerous breast removed. Only too conscious that her breasts were the chief attraction she exerted on her husband, she is sinking into a state of garrulous alcoholic despondency. She swigs continuously from a bottle, and her only other visible activity is carrying a plunger to a stopped-up toilet. That facility is overemployed, since Mert...
Mert's husband Phil is a gregarious fuel-truck driver of excessive bonhomie who reeks of gasoline fumes. He cannot cope with his wife's mastectomy. He masturbates and cheats on the side. Just to make it doubly clear that sex is all that truly bound this couple together, Playwright Burr has another couple visit Mert and Phil, and this pair indulges in the most rabid preliminaries to cunnilingus seen on the New York stage since the late...
...play, then, simply lubricious Erskine Caldwell country shipped north? Not really. Estelle Parsons' magnificently wrung-out performance as Mert would alone save it from that. The easy and obvious charge to bring against Mert and Phil is bad taste, but it, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. More than likely, the play and Joseph Papp are being lambasted for presenting subjects that audiences deeply dread facing: the corruption of the flesh, the death of love, and growing old in bleak utter loneliness. There may be too little craft in Mert and Phil, but there...