Word: play
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This only means, of course, that Getting Married is another Shavian discussion play, cast in a form of which Shaw is an acknowledged master. But though all the Shavian turnabouts and tricks and gimmicks and gags are brought into the act, Getting Married frequently seems mechanical, clumsy, tired. Surely, for instance, nobody in the entire Shavian gallery is less gracefully created than General Boxer Bridgenorth, who smokes a pipe for a running gag, points out frequently that he is "Only a silly soldier man," and says "Dash my buttons" at intervals (sometimes, a glance at the text informs me, with...
...highly uncomfortable under assumed grey hair. The casting seems to have been done on the eenie-meenie-miney-mo system, but in spite of this and other mis- and malfeasances, the director, Marston Balch, is more to be pitied than censured. Whatever may have been his conception of the play, this motley crew is incapable of rendering it. Some, of course, are better than others, but only Frederick Blais, as an affable but reverend bishop, is anything more than tolerable...
U.S.A. is a two-hour long play by John Dos Passos and Paul Shyre, based on Dos Passos's 1400 page novel trilogy. The play attempts to depict life in America from the turn of the century until the beginning of the great depression--a hundred million people over a period of thirty years. Born after the end of the time concerned, I cannot say, "This is the way it was," but only that I found U.S.A. an interesting, entertaining, and sometimes moving experience...
...fuzzy minded conservative, Dos Passos wrote the original novels while a fuzzy-minded liberal, and the play sometimes verges on the sentimental glorification of the sordid and false that fuzzy-mindedness may produce. However, a coolly ironical detachment saves most of the script from mushiness, and provides a background for emotion-packed events that enables us to accept their content as sentiment, rather than sentimentality...
Described by the authors as "a kaleidoscopic cross-section of representative forms of American life," the play focuses about the life of John Ward Moorehouse, born in Wilmington, Delaware, on the Glorious Fourth. He grows up to become J. Ward Moorehouse, public relations counsel, and U.S.A. surrounds his story with those of others who enter into his life, and with a variety of historical material: biographies of figures from the period--the Wright brothers, Eugene V. Debs, Rudolph Valentino, Henry Ford, the Unknown Soldier among others--songs, dances, newspaper headlines and stories, stream-of consciousness narrative of actual events...