Word: shrewd
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...SNOW BALL. Wasp laureate A.R. Gurney (The Cocktail Hour, Love Letters) is a shrewd chronicler of social class customs and conflicts in this Hartford Stage mounting (also to appear at San Diego's Old Globe) of a new play with music and dance adapted from his poignant novel. It shows the seductive folly of revisiting past pleasures -- for a generation that revives its youthful midwinter gala and for a pair of former partners, perfect on the dance floor but not off, reunited in a last bittersweet waltz...
...major venues. The vital thing they share is a determination to push comedy toward its mainstream limits. Absent Friends, from 1974, prefigures later and even darker works, too many not yet seen in the U.S. Lynne Meadow, who directed Woman in Mind better than Ayckbourn himself, is again shrewd, save in miscasting the clueless Peter Frechette as the guest. Fortunately, Brenda Blethyn is perfect as the nerved-up hostess. More productions like this (and fewer like the coarse, clumsy version of Taking Steps, which no fan should attend) may at last bring Ayckbourn an American acclaim...
...diametric opposite, the mercurial, spiritually obsessed Jewish homosexual Jacob: it was the vein of mystical imagery, the fascination with arcana, the tarot and the figure of the artist as Hermes Trismegistus, that pervades the Blue Period and culminates in his first masterpiece, La Vie, 1903. Likewise, Richardson is very shrewd about Picasso's relations with Stein, pointing out how her egotism was so resistant to his that she became one of his early real-life icons: her bulky presence, Richardson speculates, fused with childhood memories of his mother, led to the unnaturally massive torsos of his postwar classical nudes...
...fact, CNN's tour de force was the result of months of advance planning and shrewd lobbying. Last September it became the only news organization to win Iraq's permission to use a "four-wire," a highly reliable two-way overseas telephone connection that requires no operators or switching connections and can continue working even when local power lines are cut. "We went door to door, day after day," says Ed Turner, the cable network's executive vice president. "We became the biggest nuisances the Iraqi government ever saw until the arrival of the U.S. Air Force." By U.S. standards...
...impossible to separate those two events. They form a package. Once the rifles were truly drawn, once the liberation of Kuwait, no more than a rhetorical goal during the first days of the crisis, became the real objective of policy, an ultimatum was shrewd strategy. "The advantage of having a deadline is that it creates the maximum pressure for a peaceful solution in the last days," says British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd. Now the deadline is upon us, and it cannot be ignored. If it is, nothing will ever work...