Word: sitcomming
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This month's developments have already been excruciating. Sam and Diane, the stormy leading couple of Cheers, split up on the sitcom's concluding episode of the season. Webster's uncle (Ben Vereen) suddenly reappeared on that show's finale, setting up a custody battle for the fall. On Dynasty's season ender, the jailhouse door clanged shut on sultry, scheming Alexis (Joan Collins), who is charged (gasp!) with murder, while a car driven by a delirious Fallen Colby (Pamela Sue Martin) on her wedding day careered out of control, heading (gulp!) straight...
...play therefore, is somewhat inaccessible to present day sensibility Composed in the far away dawn of the television era, the play juxtaposes how oppressive the deadening hilarity of sitcom is next to a drama which probes the validity of all its characters feelings. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry impresses any audience with her command over an astonishing range of feeling, she recalls I M Forster at his best and least boring. But immediately one wonders if a Black playwright today, writing after the tumults, disillusion, and stilling of the last two decades, could afford the humanity which Hansberry so richly displays...
Director Patrick Bradford deserves much credit for not forcing the play into the shape of a comedy, melodrama, or sitcom, because Hansberry's plot resists constraints of form, narrowly understood. Avoiding the two temptations attendant on staging a classic. Bradford neither lets the play pull all the weight of the production, nor reinterprets the play in silly ways--making everyone wear parachute suits, for instance. Bradford's active good judgment, dramatic flair, and sense of timing preserve the thoroughness and unsentimental freshness of the original...
...Levene (Robert Prosky), a salesman on a long losing streak, who can beam like a bishop at good news and just as quickly turn to wheedling for his job. Running herd on these macho individualists is the consummate organization man, Williamson (J.T. Walsh). What is this, an MTM sitcom gone bilious? No, more like The Front Page staged in the lower depths...
...from your mind; rethink Jane; forget Boy; above all, abandon hope that Cheeta the chimp will skitter on to provide not only the movie's best acting but its only conscious comic relief as well. All of that was admittedly fun, as if the cast of a suburban sitcom had been dropped down in the African hinterlands, told to undress and act natural. But Burroughs, that dauntlessly prolific pop fictioneer, had something more important on his mind when he dreamed up Tarzan: nothing less than the creation of a mythic figure who would encapsulate the Edwardian...