Language
The language of Marber's play is brutal and sexually explicit. In scene three, where Dan and Larry are chatting on a sexual internet site, instant messaging, Marber uses crude and up-to-date terminology and dialogue that you would only see in an instant messaging conversation via the internet. In a review of the Broadway run in New York magazine, John Simon writes, "Marber tells his story in short, staccato scenes in which the unsaid talks as loudly as the said. The dialogue is almost entirely stichomythic, the occasional speech still not much longer than a few lines. There are frequent pauses, but not of the Pinteresque variety—more like skipped heartbeats...Closer does not merely hold your attention; it burrows into you." Dan is dismissive of simple words like "kind"—"Kind is dull; Kind will kill you." According to Matt Wolf, "the animalistic pulse of the play reflected in its often scabrous language."
Read more about this topic: Closer (play)
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Please stop using the word “Negro.”... We are the only human beings in the world with fifty-seven variety of complexions who are classed together as a single racial unit. Therefore, we are really truly colored people, and that is the only name in the English language which accurately describes us.”
—Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954)
“It’s not that we want the political jobs themselves ... but they seem to be the only language the men understand. We don’t really want these $200 a year jobs. But the average man doesn’t understand working for a cause.”
—Jennie Carolyn Van Ness (b. c. 1890–?)
“Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”
—Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)