Word: ratcliffe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...aggressive; its colors are about as subtle as the parlor of a San Juan cathouse. But its ambition is unshakable, even obsessive: to render an account of exotic travel as refracted through a Puerto Rican background and an ironic, modernist education. As his best exegete, Art Critic Carter Ratcliff, points out, "It is as a practitioner of a dramatic, restless, 'tropical' version of the sublime that Ferrer can best be understood." The work is hot salsa too, theatrical and loose. In his way, Rafi-as his buddies call him -is the ham his elder brother, Actor Jose Ferrer...
Wednesday's Child treats the subject of incipient schizophrenia with grim understanding. The focus of this clinical dramatization is Janice (Sandy Ratcliff), young daughter of a lower-middle-class British family, who has been more than usually bruised by the trials of adolescence. Her parents, their marriage long a stalemate of uneasily repressed hostility, commit her to the care of a therapist whose attempts to reach Janice are thwarted by his dismissal from the hospital. Wednesday's Child strains credulity here. The doctor's reasonable, low-key therapy sessions hardly seem radical enough to get him dismissed...