Word: wheeler
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...everything was going fine otherwise, the reaction would just be 'It's his stupid brother,' but now Billy's image transfers to Jimmy." California Pollster Mervin Field felt that the Billy affair provides "a disturbing reminder" of the President's previous embarrassing friendship for wheeler-dealer Banker and White House Insider Bert Lance. "The Billy thing puts President Carter on the defensive," said Pollster Louis Harris. "He will not really be able to campaign in his favorite way with high moral dudgeon...
...good of the company," as the previous choreographer was? Oris Diaghilev merely prone to the pangs of lost love? Unfortunately, any depiction of the company proves incidental; Nijinsky fails to convey much sense of excitement, or even of the life-style, of the Ballets Russes. Ross and screenwriter Hugh Wheeler seem determined not to tell a story about people who dance, but a love story about people who just happen to dance...
...knowledge of what has already been done in the theater and what little there is that remains to be done. Leib masterfully limns what W.J. Bate has pithily called "the burden of the past" with a virtuoso monologue in which Terry splices memorized quotations from a drama anthology while Wheeler, a translator, punctuates with footnotes. Terry declaims wildly and Wheeler answers, "Hedda Gabler--I think the Reinert translation," launching Terry into another recitation, from another play, which logically follows in the train of conversation. Terry knows his predecessors in Parnassus, knows them too well, in fact, ever to join them...
...universe portrayed in Terry Won't Talk follows the absurdist archetype--it's only "new and fascinating," as Wheeler says in Terry Rex, "in the sense that a man who's been shipwrecked on a desert island for two hundred years might find a telephone new and fascinating." It includes the disutility of language: language is only dinner-table "chatter," and all attempts to get Terry to verbalize his meaning fail (Linn-Baker goes through the play without a word). There is the failure even of rational thought, as epitomized in the trivializing portrait of Chester. We get the dehumanizing...
...only blot on the premiere is Kenneth Ryan, who lacks a sense of comic timing as Wheeler, stepping on some of Leib's best laugh lines. Which is a shame, because Terry is a very funny play, and depends on its humor to reach those for whom absurdism is not an assumption. (I am thinking particularly of the middle-aged audience that grew up with, not after Camus...