With a Southernly affectation in her voice, Witherspoon gives voice to each character, familiar and new, bringing emphasis and intonation to the author's long-awaited narration. .
Encumbered by long stretches of narration (divvying it up among three actresses doesn't really help), the play, directed by Jessica Thebus, never acquires much dramatic freshness either.
So drawing one sentence from each book had its own natural rhythm: a long sentence of narration from Fitzgerald, a line of dialogue from Hemingway, and an attribution to a Faulknerian character.
In a sense, the narration began long before I showed up at lunch recently to get a first taste of the new menu.
Long phrases of her narration in the third act were feather-light and gentle, flowing from note to note with complete ease, producing an effect of extraordinary peace.
Jimmy Page and Robert Plant away from the hard-rock rat-race, with surging mandolins and Denny piping high and long against an epic narration of the conflict at the eve of all things.
This kind of ventriloquism allows for savage satire, because the book is effectively one long skein of unreliable narration; the reader is forced to pick a desolate path through a wilderness that thinks itself a garden.
With the emergence of D. W. Griffith in the United States and the development of long form, psychologically nuanced narrations that Griffith's innovations helped make possible, the carnivalesque French cinema began to lose its luster, and eventually ceded its majority market share to the upstarts of Hollywood.
Viewers still remember the documentary's lush, stirring score by Richard Rodgers, even if they long ago forgot the stentorian narration.
Before long the film forsakes linear narration altogether and becomes a matrushka doll of alternating realities, dreams within dreams, flashbacks inside of tangents, periodically intercut with shots of the six principals strolling along a desolate country road on their way either to a grand picnic or a Technicolor remake of "The Seventh Seal".
Whole stretches of choral music and solo narration are delivered in long-winding (sometimes long-winded) chantlike lines.
