Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...with a small new novel, Local Anaesthetic, West Germany's Giinter Wilhelm Grass has reached into the pressing present. The book's setting is Germany today. Its grim narrative device, characteristic of Grass's grotesque humor, offers society as a patient in a dentist's chair. The plot, if it can be called that, involves the threatened sacrificial burning of a dachshund. But Grass's real concern, which currently throbs like a sick tooth through the mind and conscience of the Western world, is the Generation Gap, the morality of revolutionary protest, the apparently helpless and surely tragic bankruptcy...
...overall merit of Applause is a sleek professionalism that neatly camouflages its shortcomings. The music and lyrics have the glistening utility of railroad tracks carrying the playgoer from station to station of the plot. The chorus numbers, staged by Director-Choreographer Ron Field, belong to the squirrel theory of dance. Everyone scampers, scampers, scampers, but with so much joie de vivre that animation almost qualifies as design. A perky, elfin-like charmer named Bonnie Franklin lends spirited vitality to the song-and-dance title number and is rightly rewarded with a storm of applause...
...puss-in-spurred-boots, Penny Fuller's Eve is a model feline, but the ultimate irony of the plot is that nobody, but nobody could take a show away from Lauren Bacall. Ticket holders can certainly thank their lucky stars for that...
PETER LUKE'S Hadrian VII is a mediocre play with one outstanding central character. Structured like The Wizard of Oz, with a plot line that could have been borrowed from Putney Swope, this comic fantasy has more possibilites as soliloquy than as drama. Frederick William Rolfe, English recluse and neurotic who imagines himself Pope, has dreams more concrete than Dorothy's and ambitions no less earthshaking than Swope's. In treating the complex syndromes of Rolfe, playwright Luke has sidestepped the Putney-Swope assumption that what is sick must be funny: the Oz alternative (what is sick should be taken...
Bond: We should end the war first. We should not only redirect the money (which President Nixon says won't happen) but redirect the minds that are used to plot the war. Second, Congress has to make good on its promises of almost 30 years ago that every American will live in a decent home. Third, you must guarantee full employment. You have to provide income maintenance for those who cannot earn an income. You need make-work programs. We should break the control of the unions over the skilled trades. It's ridiculous that in a city...