Word: ayckbourn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Theater: Alan Ayckbourn's bottomless bag of tricks...
Perhaps best known for Absurd Person Singular, Ayckbourn is one of the world's most widely produced playwrights (translated into 32 languages) and surely among the most inventive. Over the years he has found plausible plot uses for everything from a Dungeons & Dragons-style game to London's Waterloo Bridge and has evoked laughs from such unlikely topics as a violent bank robbery and a young beauty's attempts to kill herself with the everyday tools and appliances of her suburban kitchen. Ayckbourn's originality, wit, poignancy and unfailing empathy for middle-class values have made him the dominant commercial...
...Communicating Doors was the centerpiece of Chicago's International Theatre Festival, while his two-part Revengers' Comedies has been enjoying a stronger production at Washington's Arena Stage than it had in London under his own direction -- in part because Arena is in the round, like the theater Ayckbourn runs in the Yorkshire city of Scarborough. In recent years troupes in Houston, Seattle and Cleveland, Ohio, have offered major Ayckbourn productions, and in 1991 two of his shows reached Broadway in the same season...
...Ayckbourn, the fleeting Chicago visit had special sentimental appeal because it involved his Scarborough troupe in their second U.S. appearance ever and first since 1981. For his fans, Communicating Doors marks an end to a period when his works grew darker and darker, to the point that they could scarcely be called comedies. "This is intentionally lighter," Ayckbourn says of his souffle of time travel, murder, melodrama and bedroom farce. "It's also meant to be affirmative after things have grown steadily worse in Britain under governments that seem not to care...
...central character starts as a prostitute. Through her own hard-won self- respect, the compassion of others and the reverberating links between past and future, she is abruptly transformed in the final moments into an educated wife and mother. This evolution is a metaphor for what Ayckbourn believes many of Britain's neglected downtrodden could achieve. But he won't let the audience off the hook with an uncomplicatedly happy ending. The flashing lights outside, seemingly signs of a festival or movie premiere, are at last revealed to be the flares of an ongoing civil war pitting London's inner...