Word: acter
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...most important offerings are verso plays: one a translation by Gerhard Nellhaus of Bertolt Brecht's "The Lesson," the other an original one-acter, "Three Words in No Time," by Lyon Phelps. "The Lesson," which is the better of the two, I think, defies analysis. It has almost no action, its characters have no individuality (they are called "The Speaker," "A One" and such), it has a chorus and a musical background, the audience is expected to join in and repeat certain lines. The ostensible topic of discussion is a crashed airman who is on the verge of death...
...Consul, Menotti's first three-acter, has a plot that is just as drab as The Medium's: the story of a desperate woman in a police state who commits suicide when her last attempt to get a visa fails. It is longer and not so compact, but it packs more than The Medium's share of melodramatic punch. It opened on Broadway with a $100,000 advance sale; by last week all seats were sold out through June...
...Lady's Not For Burning will be brought to Broadway next fall by the Theatre Guild. A Phoenix Too Frequent, a one-acter, now rehearsing in New York for a late April opening, will be his first to reach...
With his hit shows The Medium and The Telephone (TIME, June 30, 1947), Gian-Carlo Menotti had already proved that he could sell pocket-sized opera to Broadway. Last week a first-night Broadway audience bought his first full three-acter, The Consul, and bravoed for more...
...notably funny in a Tarkington-like way, yet it remembers and records the balked, anarchic feelings, the tremulous tragicomedy of ending childhood. Unfortunately, it suffers after a while from being so much less a play than a mere picture of people. It would make an ideal long one-acter. As it stands, the second act repeats the mood of the first with somewhat diminished success, and the choppy third act resorts to melodrama with no success...