Word: react
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Stapleton and Balsam are two of the most seasoned professionals in show business; both listen and react with a skill that lends the slender script warmth and pathos. They receive scant help from the Perrys. In the original story, Belli, despite his name, is Jewish. Here he is simply "Russian." In the story, Miss O'Meaghan sits atop a gravestone and imitates Helen Morgan singing Don't Ever Leave Me-and is interrupted by a file of shocked Negro mourners. Here she is given a bland song (lyrics supplied by Eleanor Perry because rights to the original were...
Indeed, I suspect particularly uptight whites in the audience will search for a black in the theater- and wait for him to laugh before they do the same. This is because many whites simply don't know how to react to blacks as people yet. When most liberals hear the black-cum-white characters in Horovitz's play putting on Butterfly McQueen accents, a sign lights up in their minds saying "Racial Stereo-types. . . Gone With the Wind. . . Racist" -and the liberals freeze...
...human being, for that matter- ever fits into any box. As Morning's family changes its voice from an Amos'n' Andy inflection to a John Lindsay or Wilson Pickett or Rap Brown inflection, the white audience is scared out of its wits. It doesn't know how to react. (The suburban liberal in the second row tells himself each time a character says "Shee-it" : "I can't laugh at that- it may be funny, but everyone will think I'm a racist...
...this way the characters manipulate the audience. The audience will react to every linguistic image-every "box"-while totally forgetting that the people on stage are human beings having nothing to do with the way they talk. Many old liberals will be so hung up on their knecjerk reactions to dialect that they will fail to deal with these people on the basis of anything but those superficial bases for which they have Pavlovian responses. The audience will be too screwed up-and frightened-by the play's complex inverted humor to listen to the words- or laugh...
...Defense Department had had accurate means of determining how the North Vietnamese people and the Viet Cong would react to an American troop build-up, Deutsch said, the Pentagon could have predicted the trend toward escalation and avoided it. Instead, Washington based its policy on the mistaken idea that large numbers of guerillas would desert rather than face a long war, be added. In that instance, Deutsch explained, the Pentagon could have furthered the interests of peace through the application of social science research...