Word: ayckbourn
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...possible transfer, Simon Gray's Melon, cues playgoers in from the start that they are entering tragic terrain: its tale of a happy man's abrupt tumble into lunacy is recounted first person in the chill of retrospect, after an equally arbitrary, untrustworthy recovery. The other play, Alan Ayckbourn's more complex Woman in Mind, gives audiences no such easy signposts and thus achieves an even richer mixture of laughter and pain. It opened last week at off-Broadway's Manhattan Theater Club in a staging by the M.T.C.'s longtime artistic director, Lynne Meadow, that excels the London original...
...Ayckbourn is often described as the Neil Simon of Britain. Both are prolific (Ayckbourn, 48, has written more than 30 plays), popular with mainstream audiences, observant of middle-class absurdities and almost compulsively funny, no matter how dark the underlying theme. The key difference: Simon has a forgiving, generous spirit toward his characters, while Ayckbourn is increasingly merciless. Audiences pause amid laughter and abruptly realize that the landscape is blasted. Ayckbourn borrowed this technique, if not much else, from Chekhov, and at his best -- as in Season's Greetings, Time and Time Again and Woman in Mind -- uses it just...
...regarded as the "travesty" of the New York production, the more phlegmatic Rice was content to let it run its course and enjoy the success. A few months later, when Rice dropped out of a treatment of P.G. Wodehouse's unflappable butler, Jeeves, Lloyd Webber enlisted Playwright Alan Ayckbourn and put the show on the boards in Bristol. It eventually closed in London after 47 performances -- a failure that continues to rankle the fierce perfectionist...
...unique exchange program with the Alley, Ayckbourn, who is director of productions of the Stephen Joseph Theater in the Round in Scarborough, has transported his company to Houston to present this work and one of his earlier plays, Absent Friends. There is nothing out-of-the-suitcase about Way Upstream, however: the Alley production is perhaps as ambitious a staging as has ever been attempted by a regional theater. The playwright's River Orb has been regurgitated into a 20,000-gal. tank of water; a 24-ft. cabin cruiser has been assembled inside; and a huge sprinkler system...
Skillful as he is, Ayckbourn has not been totally successful in this, his 26th play. The primary problem is the character of Alistair, who is, despite appearances, the center around which everything turns: he is, the author seems to be saying, the country's true salvation-if he can be made angry enough. Unfortunately, his passivity defeats even his creator, and his belated transformation from mouse to man at Armageddon Bridge seems more like a miracle than an authentic development of character. Beautifully performed, expertly produced and directed by the playwright, Way Upstream is Ayckbourn at his most provocative...