It's still grounded in elemental man-child humor, full of homosexual panic, body image anxiety and the fear of women's bodies.
Unlike those plays, which deconstruct world events with bright intellectual showmanship, "Blackbird" is theater at its most elemental: one man, one woman, one set and a head-to-head confrontation, about events long past, that occurs in real time.
The opening chapter's title "The Thing Itself" introduces a sense of timeless, elemental human battles, conjuring King Lear's unaccommodated man in the pitiless storm.
The beauty of her art tends to arise from its elemental contrasts: men and women, silence and sound, earth and sky.
The place was so crowded that it took me five minutes to pay for a cup of coffee, proving the elemental truth that man can build a superconducting collider but not a functional cafeteria.
The voices vary throughout this book's six highly speculative sequences (the first five of which conclude with shorter, surer poems identically entitled "Love's Letter"), yet again and again they call from their spectral airiness a single recurring image, an elemental configuration of man, woman and child.
The English queen is icy and professional; the other is elemental and inflames men's desires.
Her transformation from quasi man to elemental woman is complete.
On Tuesday, the drama at the Sheraton was elemental, watching as a man tried to make sense of his weaknesses in a setting tawdry and excruciating and sad, with Barnum & Bailey added for hallucinatory kicks.
Thursday brings Raymond Patterson to Humanities Hall on the C. W. Post campus of Long Island University in Brookville to read from his "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man" and "Elemental Blues" at 11 a.m.
The surprise death of former world heavyweight champ Joe Frazier reminds of the man's elemental greatness, and of the deep pitfalls of high-contact sport.
