Word: ayckbourn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...pivotal scene of the off-Broadway Absent Friends, one of two Alan Ayckbourn works from the 1970s making New York City debuts (the other, Taking Steps, opened last week on Broadway), a man rattles on about his drowned fiance to old friends who never met her. Because Colin lost his love during the first blind rapture of romance, she remains forever perfect. For friends with whom he spent times that he recalls as golden and that they barely recall at all, his ardor is tedious -- especially when he hauls out an immense volume of snapshots of the deceased. His sentimentalizing...
ABSENT FRIENDS. Mary-Louise Parker, who made last year's most stunning Broadway debut as a seductively slow-spoken ingenue in Prelude to a Kiss, heads the off-Broadway cast of Alan Ayckbourn's dark comedy about suicide and fatal illness...
...playwright, Alan Ayckbourn, 51, is represented in the West End by a new play, Man of the Moment, and a stunning revival, Absurd Person Singular, and at his regional theater in Scarborough by yet another debut, Body Language. All three are characteristically bleak and acidulous comedies staged by the author himself. The conventional wisdom about Ayckbourn has been that he started as a boulevard farceur and turned darker in the course of his 39 plays. Yet Absurd, from supposedly sunnier days in 1971, shows that acutely observed misery and hypocrisy have been his comic subjects all along. The funniest scene...
Sparkling exceptions to the West End blahs turn up in plays by Alan Ayckbourn, a stunning performance by Michael Gambon and a remarkable new production by director Peter Hall...