It's easy to be a pessimist in a world full of calamities.
"Disaster!," which opens March 8, is a spoof of '70s movies like "Airport" and "The Poseidon Adventure," and serves up a full menu of calamity — earthquake, tidal wave, fire, sharks, piranhas, giant rats — to the accompaniment of Top 40 songs from the same era.
We are declaring a city wide state of calamity.
It featured nine short plays, each hovering over lives tangled up with the impending calamity, full of people blurting things out in case it's all over, or clinging to routines (shopping, lorry deliveries, arguing) as if to defy oblivion.
A part-time medium arrives at a "becalmed" house, a home full of "the stillness that follows calamity", to search for clues to the girl's disappearance by holding an awkward seance.
The restaurant rejects her credit card and won't take a debit card, so Frances sets off through the black-and-white streets of New York in search of an A.T.M. Sprinting back to the table, she trips and sprawls headlong onto the sidewalk, the full calamity of her fall blocked from the camera's view by a parked car.
By this time the Falerians had discovered the treachery of the schoolmaster, and the city, as was likely, was full of lamentations and cries for their calamity, men and women of worth running in distraction about the walls and gates; when, behold, the boys came whipping their master on naked and bound, calling Camillus their preserver and god and father.
"Why should calamities be so full of words?" A true dare.
The recurring decimal of calamity.
The EU was born out of calamity.
