HENRY: I can't help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration hile HENRY: I can't help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration hile building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech . . . Words don't deserve that kind of malarkey. THey're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more, and Brodie knocks corners off without knowing he's doing it. So everything he builds is jerry-built. It's rubbish. An intelligent child could push it over. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
IVAN PETROVICH: Twenty-five years, he reads the works of others and prattles about realism, naturalism, specious nonsense which tMamet's "adaptation."
IVAN PETROVICH: Twenty-five years, he reads the works of others and prattles about realism, naturalism, specious nonsense which the clever have long known, and which the stupid do not care about. He had been going to a dry well with a broken bucket. And yet what self-importance. What pretension. Living in retirement....more
JOYCE: You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. NeitJOYCE: You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neitehr does it make you an artist. An artist is the magician put among men to gratify--capriciously--their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought dorwn around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships--and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the mots human, the most complete of all heroes--husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer . . . It is a theme so overwhelming that I am almost afraid to treat it. And yet I with my Dublin Odyssey will double that immortality, yes by God there's a corpse that will dance for some time yet and leave the world precisely as it finds it--and if you hope to shame it into the grave with your fashionable magic, I would tsrongly advise you to try and acquire some genius and if possible some subtlety before the season is quite over.
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TZARA: Artists and intellectuals will be the conscience of the revolution. He is a reactionary in art, and in politics h was brought up in a hard school tha tkilled weaker spirits, but he is moved by a vision of a society of free and equal men. And he will listen.
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CARR: I don't think there'll be a place for Dada in a Communist society. TZARA: That's what we haev against this one. There's a place for us in it.
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LENIN: There can be no real and effective freedom in a society based on the power of money. Are you free in your relation to your bourgeois publisher, Mr. Writer? And in relation to your bourgeois public speech which demands that you provide it with pronography? ...more
A plain language (considering as well that this takes place in French & Chinese) in colloquial American that seems at times accidental and at times deA plain language (considering as well that this takes place in French & Chinese) in colloquial American that seems at times accidental and at times deft. The third act's reversals and gender psychology "earn" the play....more
"No Exit" Garcin: Open the door! Open, blast you! I'll endure anything, your red-hot tongs and molten lead, your racks and prongs and garrotes--all you"No Exit" Garcin: Open the door! Open, blast you! I'll endure anything, your red-hot tongs and molten lead, your racks and prongs and garrotes--all your fiendish gadgets, everything that burns and flays and tears--I'll put up with any torture you impose. Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.
Garcin: I "dreamt," you say. It was no dream. When I chose the hardest path, I made my choice deliberately. A man is what he wills himself to be. Inez: Prove it. Prove it was no dream. It's what one does, and nothing else, that shows the stuff one's made of. . . . Ah, wasn't I right when I said you were vulnerable? Now you're going to pay the price, and what a price! You're a coward, Garcin, because I wish it. I wish it--do you hear?--I wish it. And yet, just look at me, see how weak I am, a mere breath on the air, a gaze observing you, a formless thought that thinks you.
Garcin: So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is--other people!
"The Flies" Orestes: You are right. No hatred; but no love, either. You, Electra, I might have loved. And yet--I wonder. Love or hatred calls for self-surrender. He cuts a fine figure, the warm-blooded, prosperous man, solidly entrenched in his well-being, who one fine day surrenders all to love--or to hatred; himself, his house, his land, his memories.
Orestes: Why, since it is their lot, should I deny them the despair I have in me? Zeus: What will they make of it? Orestes: What they choose. They're free; and human life begins on the far side of despair.
Orestes: Yes, my beloved, it's true, I have taken all from you, and I have nothing to offer in return; nothing but my crime. But think how vast a gift that is! Believe me, it weighs on my heart like lead. We were too light, Electra; now our feet sink into the soil, like chariot-wheels in turf. So come with me; we will tread heavily on our way, bowed beneath our precious load. You shall give me your hand, and we will go-- Electra: Where? Orestes: I don't know. Toward ourselves. Beyond the river and mountains are an Orestes and an Electra waiting for us, and we must make our patient way towards them....more
"Robert, if we were to say good-bye to-day, we should have nothing but beautiful memories of each other to last to the end of our lives. We should be "Robert, if we were to say good-bye to-day, we should have nothing but beautiful memories of each other to last to the end of our lives. We should be unhappy: but there are many kinds of unhappiness. Ours would be the unhappiness of those who have put love away from them for the sake of love. There would be no disillusion in it, or bitterness, or remorse."
A rather commonplace dramatization. The fun of the family size is well conveyed, but the gravity of its despot insufficiently portrayed. No mention of Ba's addiction to laudanum, though the issue of porter is obliquely glossed. Nor any real foreshadowing of the fact that Ba's father never, to his death, forgave her for running away with Robert....more
even more confounding than Ros & Guil Are Dead. most if not all of the politics and history went way over my head. memorable lines:
TRISTAN TZARA: My Geven more confounding than Ros & Guil Are Dead. most if not all of the politics and history went way over my head. memorable lines:
TRISTAN TZARA: My God, you bloody English philistine -- you ignorant smart-arse bogus bourgeois Anglo-Saxon prick! When the strongest began to fight for the tribe, and the fastest to hunt, it was the artist who became the priest-guardian of the magic that conjured the intelligence out of the appetites. Without him, man would be a coffee-mill. Eat -- grind -- shit. Hunt -- eat -- fight -- grind -- saw the logs -- shit. The difference between being a man and being a coffee-mill is art. But that difference has become smaller and smaller and smaller. Art created patrons and was corrupted. It began to celebrate the ambitions and acquisitions of the pay-master. The artist has negated himself: paint -- eat -- sculpt -- grind -- write -- shit. (A light change.) Without art man was a coffee-mill: but with art, man -- is a coffee-mill! That is the message of Dada. -- dada dada dada dada dada ... (p29)
JAMES JOYCE: You are an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts. This is not discreditable. Neither does it make you an artist. An artist is the magician put among men to gratify -- capriciously -- their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. ... (p41-2)
HENRY CARR: I dreamed about him, dreamed I had him in the witness box, a masterly cross-examination, case practically won, admitted it all, the whole thing, the trousers, everything, and I flung at him -- 'And what did you do in the Great War?' 'I wrote Ulysses,' he said. 'What did you do?' Bloody nerve. (p44)...more
thoroughly astounding: Modernism couched in between the scenes of "Hamlet." a bit of "Waiting For Godot" thrown into Ros and Guil, & a bit of "Endgamethoroughly astounding: Modernism couched in between the scenes of "Hamlet." a bit of "Waiting For Godot" thrown into Ros and Guil, & a bit of "Endgame" with the actors and barrels, but much more convoluted, much more eventful, self-referential. much more grounded in plot than beckett's work. the ending is unexpectedly spectacular. I'd love to see this in performance.
"Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current..." -Guildenstern, on the way to being executed in England instead of Hamlet...more
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