Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...steel. Mamet made the character, rather than a poor soul who is battered to the ground, someone about whom there is an element of doubt." Indeed, the play's pivotal question is the true nature of her role, the smallest of the three but the engine of the plot. Says Mosher: "The audience is meant to go out asking one another: Is she an angel? Is she a whore...
...plot, such as it is, turns on the attempts of the Madonna character to interpose her own project, an adaptation of a high-flown allegorical novel about the risks of living in an overly technologized world. The opaque and overwrought passages that she quotes sound unfilmable. Yet even if the text is drivel -- and it resonates that way from the stage -- its search for meaning touches some inarticulate longing in the secretary who is given it to read and, eventually, in her boss, who for a while joins her quixotic crusade. He starts out trying to seduce...
...high Hollywood (the first Academy Awards ceremony) to low (a house of ill fame where the girls impersonate movie stars). Edwards demonstrates a fondness for period dress, decor and autos, but he fails to develop an attitude, satirical or otherwise, toward his subject. And the obsessive twisting of his plot imposes a sinking weight of expository words on the picture...
...love. When Jack's father, the 13th Earl of Gurney, dies by hanging himself accidentally--don't ask--Jack returns from the mental hospital to inherit his peerage. The other members of the Gurney family move to have Jack committed so that they can oversee the estate. While they plot for the majority of the first act, Jack preaches about love...
...help, affecting moments for Macduff and the wife and son whom he unknowingly abandons to their murder. At the end, Macbeth and Macduff duel in silhouette, then tumble behind a row of soldiers, so there is momentary doubt about who felled whom. But surely almost everyone knows the plot: such pseudo surprise is no substitute for the deeper astonishment of fresh insight into two of the great archetypes in world drama...