attitudinize

How any “attitudinizing” crept into her performances was hard to fathom, given the authenticity she brought to her artistry at her best.

Dixon’s direction of the white actors’ performances exposes the dual meaning of the term “bad actors”: the officials’ fat-cat presumptions and facile attitudinizing are mocked in the characters’ exaggerated B-movie cadences.

Fascism also arrived in the form of apparent buffoons: Adolf Hitler, shabby and sullen, and Benito Mussolini, whose almost desperate displays of masculinity struck many non-Italians, including one foreign journalist, as “absurd attitudinizing.”

But those two pieces, each insubstantial while laden with surface attitudinizing, occurred before the intermission.

The play sustains this tongue-in-cheek attitudinizing almost until the end.