Word: shrillness
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...simple to the point of transparency--becomes so cluttered as to be almost impenetrable. The rest of his performance is sloppy but sometimes affecting. The first night I saw the show McCue hit some surprising notes of anguish in the third act, but on the second the scene was shrill and unfelt...
...energetic a pair as they were last season; new faces animate the female roles--Cynthia Darlow as Hermia and Cherry Jones as Helena. Darlow's Hermia thrusts her lower lip out at life with a little-girl pout that is sometimes winning and a whine that's sometimes shrill; Jones is more the robust than the morose Helena, bludgeoning Demetrius with her lust. The four lovers interact with a vigor that sometimes shakes the planks of the set, providing an object lesson in how these roles can both stand out individually and click with their counterparts...
Obviously, some of these grievances are more urgent than others. But in a strange way they have all been blended into one shrill complaint. There is something quite special going on here. The city is not solely an object of scorn for being clumsy and cold. The very idea of Washington is hated too. And both the idea and the fact of the city have now become so confused in the public mind that expressions of contempt for the place sound as if the city had done the complainer some personal injury: "It is impossible for me to express...
...Square conjures up the archetypes of old New England. What isn't dark or neutral is flag-colored, like the fife-and-drum wallpaper that peels at its yellowed seams. A red telephone, the locus, sits ominously on the pastor's oaken desk. When it rings, the sound is shrill, urgent, like the Oval Office hot line or the Batphone. But to Pastor Tom Michael, the caller on the other end transcends Zbigniew Brzezinski or Commissioner Gordon. For when the enemy is sin, each call concerns not law and order, but eternal life and perpetual damnation...
...apparently ended a few years before his death in 1976 -was tolerated by his comrades on the condition that he keep his new commonlaw wife away from politics. But when Mao launched China on the chaotic Cultural Revolution in the mid-'60s, Jiang Qing rose to become the shrill tyrant of the movement. "Sex," she once confided to American Sinologist Roxane Witke, "is engaging in the first rounds. What sustains interest in the long run is power...