Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...second act, however, Victoria (now played by Loranger) proves to be the pivotal character rather than Clive. Whereas the man who ran the household in Victorian times controlled the sexual manueverings and perferences of those in his household, the daughter/emerging liberated woman oversees...
...comes as little surprise. For the play is all about repression and conforming to sexual expectations, or not. Every character in Cloud 9 is trying to break free of repression and act only as he or she wishes. Mired in having to hide perversities behind closed doors in the Victorian age, the characters have no hope of achieving any freedom...
...homosexual Edward who enjoys being passive is played by Zelman who formerly played Betty, the obedient Victorian wife. The young Edward who vascillated in the first act between wishing he could play with dolls or be with the men becomes transformed into the adult Victoria who also seems unable to decide her own destiny. And Betty becomes more self-confident as the woman who plays the domineering Mrs. Sanders in the first act takes on the role of Betty in the second...
...jukebox Juliet in some 1980s T shirt ripper. The reverse is just as emphatically true for most of the young American actresses. Try seeing Laura Dern's superior performance as a hormone-fogged California adolescent in Smooth Talk, for instance, and then envision her in a Victorian corset and long skirt. Fuses blow; imagination does not stretch that far. Dern, for starters, has too much Pacific Ocean salt in her blond hair, and her lanky good looks are too much a matter of knees and shoulders and elbows. She looks as if she should be playing power forward...
...Harold Skimpole, the "damaged young man . . . who had undergone some unique process of depreciation" in Bleak House, was the poet Leigh Hunt. A boasting letter from Charles Dickens is exhibit A: "The likeness is astonishing. I don't think it could be more like (Hunt) himself." Dickens tempered his Victorian portrait with humor, but George Eliot was made of sterner stuff. Apologizing to a clergyman who had recognized an unflattering likeness in Scenes of Clerical Life, she explained that she had thought he was dead...