Word: shocks
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...energy at the center of Paul Rudnick's new play about the twin evils of censorship and ambition (we're talking art and politics, of course) is its fervent desire to shock. Rudnick, who wrote the Obie-Award-winning "Jeffrey," has mastered the minefield of homosexuality and a Republican Congress--turning up a gem of a play amidst such well-traveled territory. Though this jouncy, stunningly designed production never quite stoops low enough to outrage, the pace is uptempo and the lines clever enough to jolt even the savviest Village person into a laugh of bemused recognition...
...Alex del Flavio's art) and "How did gay people get to America?" (as flight attendants), both Maffin and Hart give strong renditions of what are essentially stereotyped parts. Strutting, proclaiming, writhing in what he calls his "flash bulb therapy," Maffin does a good imitation of an attention-starved, shock-happy artist slowly coming to terms with the hypocrisy of selling out. But by the play's end, Hart's consistently contrarian Nan Bemiss wins the audience's attention away from the flashier, impetuous artist with her more grown-up version of betrayal...
...there is evidence for much more serious charges against Seselj. When fighting broke out in 1992, he became one of the three key Serb paramilitary leaders who provided the shock troops of ethnic cleansing. He recruited and commanded a rabid band of "volunteers" dubbed the Chetniks in honor of Serbia's World War II royalist antifascist squads. Dressed in natty black jackets, the Chetniks left a well-documented trail of blood as they rampaged across Croatia and Bosnia, all the while bragging they were acting under Seselj's command. They exaggerate, he says. "I just happen to have...
Lebanon is not as devastated as before, but the damage has been substantial. So has the shock. While the conflict in the south sputtered on year after year, Beirutis had become complacent about it. But in its effort to put pressure on Syria and the Lebanese government, Israel did not merely go after Hizballah guerrillas; it attacked the infrastructure and drove people from their homes by shelling and bombing villages, after warning the residents that they would be killed if they did not leave. At least 160 Lebanese were killed during the operation, and half a million people were displaced...
...later work this lyricism would too often get buried under the polemics, but in the '60s it was to the fore, and it accounts for the pathos of a piece like The Wait, 1964-65. At first it's a shock, like coming across Mama's corpse from Psycho in a museum. The old woman is waiting for death; her head is a sheep's skull in a jar on whose front is pasted a photo of herself when young; she wears a necklace of memories: jars containing gilded mementos of prayer, marriage, long-gone sexual love. The repeated forms...