Word: text
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First, the word narrator. I think that this is the most important buzzword for any English concentrator, or any student dealing with a fictional text, to learn. In fiction, if you call the narrator something like "the author," any teaching fellow who plans on finishing graduate school will turn your paper into cream cheese. The narrator carries out most of the functions of the author in terms of being able to construct the text...
...underscore the bare ugly truths of the Tyrone family, not only does Gammons rearrange the plot, but he also excises the text. This powerful interpretation brings home the way that each member of this family has acted and been acted upon to create a collectively tragic fate. Hardcore cynicism and hopelessness gain prominence through Gammons's textual revisions. He deletes lines like "all I care about is to see you get well" and "she loves you as dearly as ever mother loved a son." Characters are tightened up rarely silly or mushy...
However potent Gammons vision is, it limits the richness of O'Neil's text in two ways. By refusing to let the truths develop out of illusions, Gammons sacrifices O'Neil's "happy family" setup of the first act that universalizes the Tyrones and invites the audience to identify with them. Because no process of gradual realization remains to develop the plot sequence, Gammons's versions seems like a series of incidents strung together but not causally related--gone is the sense of crescendo in the final...
Second, the audience wonders why this family stays together at all. While O'Neil certainly saw the family as part of the cause of tragedy, he also allowed it to function as a source of support. Gammons has subverted most of the text and stage directions that directly present those few non-dysfunctional moments of this family. When Jamie declares "I love you more than I hate you," one has to believe that he means...
...text abounds in unusually shapely language for Miller, and in jokes. The production is not, alas, quite as polished. Tom Conti looks too young for Miller's antihero (although the script is inconsistent about his history) and seems too ingratiating. Perhaps the idea is to suggest that king-of-the-jungle fantasy persists in the most genial men; even so, Conti evokes intellectual posturing more than yearning. Gemma Jones is suitably antiseptic as his first wife, but Clare Higgins seems a bit stale for the younger second one, and Deirdre Strath just shouts as a grownup daughter...