Screen

...It's the heat...

...K ''~: Issues which, in the best of Jesuit...

...Nick (D.W...

...By the end of the play, it becomes clear that she has made an emotional cripple of her daughter not out of ignorance or nastiness, but because she needs to keep her...

...The play's title comes from the room-and-much- board program at the camp, but the suggestion of Nick's friend that they both marry, become good husbands, fathers, providers, and continue their affair is also an American plan...

...MESA Bulletin "The great service that this book offers is to present the Islamic understanding of God, the world, the flow of history, and the essence of humanity in terms that are not onl)) compre- hensible to the non-Muslim reader but which actively lift him or her outside a parochial Western orientation...

...Although, moat- like, Eva can keep away the princes that come to rescue her daughter, she is--dramatically, at least--the traditional evil witch--not the hard-breathing, cackling, Margaret Hamilton kind of witch suitable for Oz...

...That parading elephant, for instance, seems to smile at the Krichinskys...

...He has long since lost his lover and has dwindled to teaching math in a prep school near Cincinnati...

...AMERICA is a weekly journal of opinion published for the thoughtful...

...Featured regularly are incisive articles on contemporary -~ theology and current events, lively...

...Having been pulled into the amorphousness of the first act fairy story, we are smothered by specificity in the second act...

...and his sister, who gets most of the play's funny lines, is not much better...

...Sam, a man of rudimentary education, might not know this, but he would probably come to know the popular song, "I Left My Love in Avalon...

...Sometimes the noticing is merely of personality quirks: the way, for instance, the heavy, plodding speech pattern of Michael's grade school teacher matches the heavy, lumbering quality of her body and the way it always seems to be sinking into itself...

...Had Lili, knowing all that Nick has done, run off with him (as she says she would have) and had he carried her away for love rather than money, the ending--the play sug- gests-would have been the same...

...Anderson blames the death of her other son from A'DS on Orin and the other kids who mocked him when he was young...

...Like Nick's dream city, it would give them everything...

...Avalon" is the name of the neighborhood Sam wanders through but it is also the earthly paradise where King Arthur and his knights rest...

...What got recorded seems to be a smile...

...We'll then ~.Z~,~,~ send you 22 weeks of our award-winning magazine for Name Address City State Zip SA 1308 Offer valid for new U.S...

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...Furthermore, Levinson's need to see the grandfather as a paragon of old-world peasant wisdom gives Armin Mueller- Stahl a role that is patently manufactured to tug at our heartstrings, a patriarch without the faults, the crags, the darknesses that a major character must have to convince...

...For me, the play is more interesting than Eastern Standard because the dark underbelly of the situation here is more believ- able than the sunny angst of Greenberg's Broadway success...

...But the story that Levinson actually tells doesn't justify his implicit indictment of America...

...Anderson from next door...

...Neither Orin's father, who suffers from piles and a conviction that America is in ruins, nor his mother, a nurse with aching feet and an acid tongue, can speak directly to him...

...His mother calls to him from the porch, "You forgot your dime...

...Levinson and his gifted cinematographer, Allen Davieu, find many "cabbages" for the Krichinskys, and us, to notice...

...At this point, the Greenberg of Eastern Standard, the chronicler of the fashionably correct, emerges, for Nick's decline is made clear by his ill-fitting tweed jacket and slacks, so unlike the clothes he wore when he was a prince--or, at least, a contender...

...Foreign, add $3...

...Zhivago "where the child Yury, taken to his mother's funeral, looks out the window at the cabbages, wrinkled and blue with cold, in the winter fields...

...Quinn's work is particularly haunting (though his face evokes Ireland rather than Eastern Europe...

...Parabola $16.95 pb 242 pages ISBN 0-88706-163-X To order State University of New York Press c/o CUP Services .9 PO Box 6525 Ithaca, NY 14851 1-800-666-2211 Postage/handling: Domestic and Canada, add $2...

...Avalon may fail as social insight but it is wonderfully alive...

...film and book reviews as well as special theme editions that provide an in-depth look at controversial The issues and prominent personalities, lilts Join us as we explore such dtSO...

...In the final scene, Nick recalls a German song Lili sang to him which she repeats and translates: "There is happiness, but it is for others...

...It is an unremarkable particle of someone else's childhood suddenly becoming a reenactment of a piece of our own past...

...Davieu caught the curve of its mouth at precisely the right angle when the elephant was turning its head in the camera's direction...

...McCarthy cites that scene in Dr...

...The last shot of the film is a reprise of Sam's arrival amid the patriotic hoopla of 1914...

...Eva is a wealthy German Jewish widow, a survivor of the Nazis, who had built elegant isolation for herself, a summer home from which she can watch and condescend to the antics of the hearty, heavy-feeding vacationers at the camp across the lake, or--like the Czarina they call her---occasionally join the peasants for mahjong...

...She speaks in the same quiet but commanding voice, at once civilized and threatening, whether she is mocking the campers across the lake, commenting on the decline of the world, or shredding the disguise of the current prince...

...This is the negative version of the positive message, the love diatribe, that Frieda--a 56: Commonweal...

...In close-up, Michael makes his hands into a catcher's mitt and yells, "Throw it...

...His approach is both refreshing and persuasive...

...Whatever road they took, Lili's song would still be appropriate...

...In fact, he has never built anything...

...they bustle...

...too mechanical an introduction of the homosexual subplot...

...Writer-director Barry Levinson then cuts to a long shot of all the Krichinskys in various stages of departure, but our eyes understandably seek out the now tiny figure of Michael, somewhat left-of-center screen...

...25 January 1991:55 pressed breadearner's exasperation, he serves up a rarity: a witty portrait of a simple, humorless man...

...the "perhaps" because Lili (or Eva, at least) is as rich as his fiancee and he is a Cheeveresque charmer without funds...

...In her brilliant essay, "Characters in Fiction," Mary McCarthy noted that "sensation and sensibility are at their height in the child...

...There he finds and perhaps falls in love with Lili...

...Anderson's slow-witted son, who used to beat up both Orin and her as they grew up, and that Mrs...

...Avalon is a minor masterpiece of sensation and sen- sibility, flawed only by its maker's inability to reach beyond sensation and sensibility...

...The play takes place in the Catskills in 1960...

...Meanwhile, all around Michael, his family yells goodbye and departs...

...complicated issues as...

...The reader discovers that those elements in the religion of Islam that seem so difficult to understand --and so easy therefore to reject-- have a logic of their own and an integrity that is indisputable when seen in context...

...She sees herself as a captive princess, guarded by Olivia--a hand- some, self-contained black woman with no visible life of her own--and surrounded by a moat (her mother...

...To subscribe, simply fill out the AMERIC...A coupon and return it to us along ~,,,~,o with your payment...

...This is deft filmmaking...

...4~f...

...So, too, with the fairy-tale ending, had it been possible...

...It also has a socially critical schema that doesn't pay off...

...It is, of course, a promise of disaster...

...The Krichinskys are split up not by America's customs or institutions but by universal woes: clan bickering over money and imagined affronts, the frictions between generations, aging and death...

...Sometimes the noticing is horrific, as when Michael, inside the family car, helplessly witnesses the attempted mugging of his 54: Commonweal salesman father and sees his parent and the assailant dashing each other against the car windows before they fall out of sight locked in each other's arms...

...The men are going to work...

...He ends up being nothing more than a cinematic descendant of Irene Dunne in I Remember Mama...

...In a final scene, ten years later, we meet Lili, who has become a slightly softer version of her now dead mother, and Nick, who has never built the dream city he once promised...

...And Michael does finally pick up the dime...

...MasterCard, VISA, American Express accepted...

...You are home to me, she says, her voice as controlled as always, in a scene in which Lili cries out for any place but home...

...But many sequences convey the sensation of reality noticed from an odd and interesting angle, a sensation that is common to chil- dren and rare for preoccupied adults...

...And there is the occasional, purely enjoyable surprise, as when a circus parade interrupts a cranky clan business council...

...The Krichinskys never merely move...

...In the end, unable to resist the lover who has come in search of him--another WASP loose in the Catskills--he cuts and runs...

...A short play about an acrimonious family, it brings wimpish Orin, who blames his spinelessness on his upbringing, home for dinner although no one can remem- ber having invited him and there is no food in the house except that brought in by Mrs...

...There is more to Avalon, though, than such vivid details...

...and the DESTINY of MAN Charles Le Gai Eaton "This work is one of the most eloquent and penetrating studies on Islam to appear in a European language...

...The sight of Grandfather Sam arriving in Baltimore around 1914 in the middle of the city's July 4 celebration is repeated throughout the movie as a motif of immigrant faith in the wonderland of America, where anything can happen, where anyone can succeed...

...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE WITCHES" TALES 'AMERICAN PLAN' & 'DIATRIBE' ili Adler, the heroine--so to speak---of Richard Greenberg's The American Plan, is imaginative (i.e., a liar), hysterical, dependent on her mother, and desperate in her dependence...

...Make checks payable to SUNY Press...

...the women prepare to do errands...

...Moffett) and Lili (Wendy Makkena) are an attractive odd couple who seem to find strength in one another, but there are too many holes in this prince's armor for him to outsmart the witch of the moat...

...Catholic Universities AMERIC...A I ''' .9American Catholic Intellectual Life Libe rat ion "l~,e~!ogy .9The Crisis in Hispanic "e~''~rl~"~a~'er' J"Ministry ~ ~ ~ ~.~ A~.~., .9Abortion Tests for Catholic Politicians .9The Health Care Crisis ~., .~.~ .9Archbishop Romero, the ~ .! o;~ U.S...

...d tradition, invoke lively discourse ~:~L and serious thought...

...Not every event in Avalon is seen through the eyes of the boy, for the entire Krichinsky family is the protagonist of Avalon...

...It doesn't expand our adult perception of the way our society works, but it does turn us into wondering, noticing, absorbing children...

...its thin tender membrane of perception is constantly stabbed by objects, words, and events that it does not understand...

...His mother does but Michael drops the bus fare...

...None of these incidents would make any incision in our"mem- b~:ane of perception" had not Levinson and Davieu managed to see them from just the right angle, in just the right light, against just the right backgrounds...

...F ~ .9Academic Freedom in 1...

...It presents Islam in such a manner that it is both authentic and comprehen- sible to the intelligent Western reader...

...She is a marvelous character--the theatrical heart of the play--and Joan Copeland is fascinating in what is probably the best role of her career...

...The play's prince is Nick Lockridge, a WASP in unfamiliar country, who has come to the camp on the lake with the rich Jewish girl he plans to marry...

...and El Slavador...

...These declines are truth- fully portrayed by Levinson, but they don't add up to the social indictment that his structure implies...

...Greenberg intends something more, I think...

...The American Plan is a very dark fairy tale...

...the little boy Michael hurries down the front walk on his way to school...

...The difficulty with the new play is that the situation, so neatly defined in the first act, is overwhelmed with too much in the second: Too much biography for Nick...

...And then the hind quarters of a pachyderm appear outside the window...

...This little moment epitomizes what's wonderful in Avalon...

...That is far too neat a final statement...

...He shifts his position to get a better purchase but still doesn't succeed...

...n this season of fairy tales, Harry Kondoleon's Love Diatribe is--ostensibly--the one with the happy ending...

...It should be read by all Westerners interested in an under- standing of the Islamic tradition...

...SCREEN BANALITY MADE MAGICAL LE NSON'S 'AVALON' ~ airly early in Avalon, the Krichinskys (a Polishr Jewish family confidently making its way up into the American middle class of the late 1940s) are leaving their house on a cold winter morning...

...Alternating slightly stunned quizzicality with familial tenderness and a hardReceive 22 Issues Of AMERICA The National Catholic Weekly For As Little As $14.95 Edited by the Jesuits since 1909, AMERIC...

...Unnerved by his mother's death, the loss of the family money, his father's suicide, Nick loses control of his life, gets fired, breaks with his homosexual lover, wanders from temporary shelter to temporary shelter, hopes to find salvation by marrying money...

...It is a sliver of banality made magical by both the careful prepa- ration for it (the boy, in close-up pumping his "mitt") and the lack of insistence on it (the cut to long shot that shows the boy's moment as only part of the bigger moment of the family's depar- ture...

...She is convinced that people die of what is said to them, done to them...

...thunders an uncle, "You're hallucinating...

...reader interested in the Catholic perspective...

...By this time, the motif has become a reproach, an emblem of the promise that America fails to keep, of the immigrant's American Dream that will never be fulfilled...

...I just saw an elephant go by," remarks the mother casually...

...The Krichinsky fortunes go up and down and up, and, by the middle of the 1950s, the squabbling, loving clan has become atomized, suburbanized, and so alienated from tradition that old Sam, walking away from his wife's funeral (unattended by many family members), mutters brokenly, "this is not a family...

...Add that the sister, who has just left her husband, is having an affair with Mrs...

...Throw it...

...Crouching, his fingers clumsy inside winter mittens, he tries to pick up the thin coin but can't...

...too much ugliness for Eva...

...Whatever our backgrounds, we have all, as children, stopped to recover that recalcitrant dime, and while watching Michael we do it again...

...You must understand, says the author, that the Muslim simply looks at things in a manner which is often very different from the way you in the West view them...

...By contrast, Joan Plowright, Aiden Quinn, and Elizabeth Perkins are enabled by their roles to display contrasting traits, and therefore their performances, all excellent, live more vividly in the memory...

...Eva is not only self-assured (at least on the surface) but malevolent...

...The combination of rhetoric and logic sweeps one along in the flow of the book...