Much of the pathos in these pages comes from the pain his emotionally crippled characters inflict on the people who care about them, people who don't understand that Mattia and Alice are unreachable.
It's a shame this production never allows Turner to embody fully the debilitating anxiety that cripples her character's self-confidence.
A middle-aged Welsh architectural historian discovers that he is really the son of Holocaust victims from Czechoslovakia in this rich, gloomy novel by a writer who has specialized in characters crippled by the past.
Linked stories by a Chinese émigré; his characters are crippled by inability to turn around as fast as their dictators.
Before I saw Gyllenhaal's Masha, and Josh Hamilton as her brother, Andrey, I thought of those characters as crippled by their intelligence, lost in a provincial world that doesn't appreciate them.
It wasn't "Cat" but another Williams masterwork that piqued her interest in returning to the theater — "The Glass Menagerie," and the character of the withdrawn, crippled Laura Wingfield.
Where Mr. Bowie has freely moved between personas, Mr. Smith has chosen his own lipsticked character to express that part of himself that is crippled with doubt, wracked by lust, fear and regret.
One of the first plot points is a child getting thrown off a ledge and crippled after he witnesses some nasty-ass incest; one major character gets killed on the toilet and shits all over the place as he dies.
The singular characters who go about their business in Dublin's crippled economy may be on opposite sides of the law, but in Kerrigan's book they're all working-class stiffs struggling to get by.
But "Bertie," as Firth's character is known to his family, has much graver concerns: he is crippled by a stammer that makes public speaking a devilish chore.
