Word: protagonists
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Domini's main strengths lie in violent, unconventional metaphor and involved plotting--so involved, in fact, that bristling complexities, few of which are ever resolved, end by frustrating or intimidating the reader. A favorite theme seems to be the middle-aged protagonist grappling with the leftover complications of long-ago some adventure that ripped the fabric of a conventional life: a successful businessman, whom the CIA drugged with LSD 20 years ago as a random experiment, throws himself into the public eye by suing the government for his life's subsequent turmoil; a Vietnam veteran, past 30, goes to Florida...
Once again our protagonist is Trapped, a bright, attractive housewife dramatizing wildly to retain her sanity while being battered senseless by the weapons of Domesticity. Addressing the audience as one would the wall in a world gone ga-ga, the wife. Babs, bobs and jiggles like an adorable, black-eyed marionette. Objects like vacuum cleaners, blenders and detergents take on a sinister life of their own: the dog, her one friend, weighs about 250 pounds, goes shopping and watches television. The play is liberating because it magnifies everyday neuroses into a giddy surrealism that comes far closer to capturing...
...play is occasionally shrill and familiar; and the ending, in which the protagonist cries "Give me a chance to find some intrinsic value" and is whisked away by a deux ex machina, lacks the delicacy of the play's best moments. But at least it points to a kind of theatre beyond the blank, muddy "reality" that the rest of these plays have a foot in. Mark Milliken has staged Fits and Starts with merry rambunctiousness, and the piece is fetchingly danced by Julia Newton, an utterly charming waif. Annette Miller and John Adair, though, as mother and dog respectively...
Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the John) answers most of the objections to filmed sex precisely by seeing sex as one facet, however crucial, of its protagonist's life. This lightly fictionalized autobiography is Writer-Director-Star Frank Ripploh's first feature film, and it is as ostensibly artless as a home movie. In the film, Frank is a well-liked teacher in a Berlin secondary school, a fond son, an amateur film maker and an energetic participant in the city's homosexual night life. His lover Bernd (Bernd Broaderup, who took the same role in Frank...
...protagonist, Iago, Christopher Plummer gives a shrewdly structured yet hearteningly scenery-chewing Performance--careful and nuanced enough to dispel Colerdge's nagging "motivelessmalignity" tag. At the start he is sleazily pthetic, a bundle of unchannelled energy expressed in random, hoarsely inexpressive shouts and struts. When not center stage he is erect and twitching against a back wall, his eyes glazed as if his brains were being barbecued. He is no Mahiavelli, but a quick-witted opportunist handed a turkey and a shotgun. Recongnizing this, his frame swells with cookiness. It's gestures become honed, and his voice pierces effortlessly through...