Word: western
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While expeditions to Western Europe and other industrialized areas do not generally pose health risks to Americans, visits to "developing" nations make travelers be on the alert...
According to OCS statistics, about 60 percent of the students in study abroad programs travel to Western Europe...
Forget General Exams for English concentrators. If you can make it through a production of Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato's The Idiots Karamazov at the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) without feeling lost at least once, then you're well on your way to an encyclopedic knowledge of all Western literature. Talk about high cultural capital. It's not just any play that requires the equivalent of a doctorate in world literature for even cursory reference. But then again, Christopher Durang isn't just any writer. And perhaps only Durang could make a play so unabashedly laden with obscure references...
...this trip (and I do mean trip) through history and literature is the eminent 19th-century translator of Russian literature Constance Garnett, whose unrelenting Englishness (read: priggishness) has been a scourge to modern translators from Nabokov on. Fashioned by Durang as a kind of Charles Kinbote for the entire Western cannon, Garnett is as much a mangler of Russian literature as a scholar of it. (The Russian word for frustrated homosexual is Peter Tchaikovsky, she says). Played with unrelenting and downright hysterical formality by Thomas Derrah, Garnett becomes as loveable as she is overbearing. Listening to her roll...
...must be given credit for taming this tornado of a play. Performed as part of the A.R.T.'s CrossCurrents initiative, an ongoing attempt to "create and sustain a body of new music theatre works," The Idiots Karamazov intersperses cabaret-style singing with its mad dash through practically all the Western fiction and drama worth reading. But an experiment in Brechtian musical theater this is not. With love ballads about the loss of Christian morality that come across as even more depressing than Tom Stoppard's musings in Jumpers and show-stoppers about the benefits of being a male nun, Durang...