Word: acter
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...short two-acter, Prostitute is Existentialist Sartre's blast at racism and reaction in the U.S. South (which he visited briefly in 1946). The play tells how Lizzie McKaye, a Northern prostitute new to a Southern town, is unsuccessfully high-pressured but effectively soft-soaped into accepting the town's mores. She signs a paper that frames a Negro for rape and lets a white murderer go free. Afterwards Lizzie (well played by Meg Mundy*) feels tricked and disturbed, hides the Negro during a manhunt. But Liz eventually becomes resigned and "respectful"-she agrees to be the mistress...
...their first independent production (under J. Arthur Rank), they stuck to their highly successful formula; their adaptation of Coward's one-acter, Brief Encounter, was one of the top critical successes of the year - in both Britain and the U.S. They decided to make Great Expectations for two reasons: 1) it was about time to try something besides Noel Coward's work, and 2) Lean had read through the complete works of Dickens in search of movie material...
...woman opera impresario in the world last week launched the freshest, most bumptious U.S. opera troupe on its second Manhattan season. The impresario is Hungarian-born Yolanda Mero-lrion of the youthful New Opera Company. For openers, Impresario Irion chose The Opera Cloak, Walter Damrosch's latest one-acter, and The Fair at Sorochinsk, a rollicking opus by Russia's rum-nosed Immortal, Modeste Moussorgsky. Eighty-year-old Composer Damrosch conducted his curtain raiser without drowning out the audience's spirited conversation. But for The Fair at Sorochinsk, they sat up, shut up and pounded their palms...
Magic (by G. K. Chesterton) and Hello, Out There (by William Saroyan) provide a double bill that prompts a single verdict. Both playwrights are much better at dialogue than drama. Saroyan's one-acter is more rewarding because it's simpler and more human. It tells of a guy (Eddie Dowling) in a small-town Texas jail who, before he is killed by a mob, talks through the bars of his cell with the jail's wispish slavey of a cook (Julie Haydon). Theirs is a brief rapprochement, a doomed romance, of two desperately lonely, anonymous souls...