Word: verbalized
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...Sybil--two cretin-like characters representing the very best in English shallowness. There is no further development of plot after act one, there is no major physical action beyond a brief lover's fight in the second. The director and the actors must build all the visual and verbal humor upon the nearly barren skeleton of the script and, at each performance, the actors must keenly tune the pace and style to suit the particular audience in order to thwart that "first sinister cough of boredom," as Sir Noel so aptly put it. At the Tufts Arena Theater, on Friday...
Arnott, in order to squeeze the maximum wit out of Coward's insipid manuscript, has worked out what appears to be a second-by-second computer program for verbal inflections, facial contortions, physical maneuvers, and furniture kicking. During the extensive arguments and love bouts of Elyot and Amanda, the play's spirited and engaging cynics, the precise sense of timing turns insults, cigarette lighting, and record smashing into high comic art. At times, Arnott's exhaustive direction and his actors' slavish execution reaches self-parody: it is worthwhile, during the course of the play, to study carefully the director...
...actor." Hutson and Lewis, as Elyot and Amanda, are a sharp, strong, and attractive duo who avoid most of Coward's worst pitfalls--abysmal dialogue, kitschy scenes, and trite psychology--and maximize Coward's well hidden strengths--the parody of English manners and social institutions, the art of verbal thrust and counterthrust, the sharp criticism of women's roles in society. Consider a typical Coward "life-line": "If there's one thing in the world that infuriates me, it's sheer wanton stubbornness. I should like to cut off your head with a meat axe." Without Jan Lewis's acid...
...concern for the national interest among these men. They talk about saving themselves, each other, about "modified limited hangout," about p.r. "But they never mention what is best for the country," he says. He gets a chuckle out of the fact that Nixon may give a man a hard verbal rap, later give him a new job or great praise...
...skills demonstrated by the Harvard team in winning this championship encompass qualities very different from the debater's stereotyped image as a William F. Buckley-type of verbal gymnast. Instead, academic debate has been evolving toward emphasis on such scholarly values as thoroughness of research and analytic depth. Although presentation is still important, academic debate today is much more a practical exercise in the techniques of evaluating public policy than a contest in rhetorical and persuasive skills. Ideally, tournament debate may be viewed as a laboratory in which alternative ideas generated by the social sciences are subjected to the test...