Mr. Stanley, it turns out, is a tender guy who misses his vanished wife and forgives her negligence.
Van Gogh's image of Gauguin is uncannily like Scott Fitzgerald's of Hemingway, thirty years later he saw him as a "natural man," a fighter and a beast with the parallel complication that the tough guy could hold his liquor and the tender guy could not.
But in "Opus 19," while the man is a poetlike visionary, the heroine is unconventionally abrasive: you don't expect this difficult gal to be the object of this tender guy's dreams.
It is not all fun and games for Satan either, forced as he is to put up with the invasive interviewing techniques of Mike Wallace; an incompetent painter ("999"); residents playing with the thermostat and ordering pizza; and various graffiti insults: "Satan is a warm and tender guy" and "Hey, you call this hot?" The Far Side God is rather human -- an old man to be precise.
After the duo went to work as grain buckers, met Curley Alex Morff) and his "tart" wife (Leighton Meester, of "Gossip Girl" fame), and got into trouble, the play ended with a similarly tender "guys like us" scene, punctuated by a gunshot.
But there are wonderful ensemble scenes and stunning performances all around, including that of Jo Hartley, as Sean's earthy, tuned-in mom; Graham, as the explosive skinhead; and, especially, Turgoose, as the punky but tender tough guy in the making.
I KNOW you think I'm like a hard, cold, captain of industry type," that tender tough guy, Tony Soprano, tells his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi, with a look that begs for sympathy.
You might even feel sorry for him, as if he were one of those guys whose tender intellect has been sandbagged by notions about Atlantis or Area 51.
Before he met Scott Bond, Simon Raine was just a guy who tendered cleaning contracts for a few nightclubs across the country.
The good Barthelme, on the other hand, writes from the middle of life, a curious guy with a tender disposition and a great affection for the humdrum.
He's a handsome, intellectual kind of guy with a tender quality.
