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- <text id=91TT1928>
- <title>
- Aug. 26, 1991: View Points:Theater
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991
- Aug. 26, 1991 Science Under Siege
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- VIEW POINTS, Page 63
- THEATER
- Black, White and Blue-Collar
- </hdr><body>
- <p>By William A. Henry III
- </p>
- <p> Cartoonists from Jules Feiffer to Garry Trudeau have
- doubled as playwrights, for understandable reasons: both crafts
- use dialogue and visual narrative, and in both the best humor
- is rooted in personality. Lynda Barry, whose weekly comic strip
- Ernie Pook's Comeek appears in 55 newspapers, shows that her
- truest metier may be the stage in THE GOOD TIMES ARE KILLING ME,
- a sometimes campy yet mostly poignant off-Broadway memoir of
- blue-collar life in the '60s. The plot crams in far too much--infidelity and divorce, the random death of a child, teen sex,
- Volare, bygone rock dances, a misbegotten camping trip--and
- the two dozen-plus characters are mostly stereotypes and
- sketches. But the core story is believably specific and
- disconcertingly universal: the emergence of a friendship
- between two preteen girls, one black and one white, amid all the
- social influences that tend to divide them. Angela Goethals, 14,
- is affectingly sincere as the white narrator. As her friend,
- Chandra Wilson, who turns 22 this week, has wit and fire and the
- promise of major stardom. W.A.H. III
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
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