Word: bentley
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...Eric Bentley compared dramatic plots to peanuts in a speech Thursday night. "You may not like it, but you can't stop eating it," said the critic. "When I tell you incident A, you want incident...
...working relationship between the playwright and the adaptor followed immediately on the heels of their first encounter in 1941. Few people in America had heard of, let alone wanted to translate, Bertolt Brecht. Bentley, then an instructor at U.C.L.A., was introduced to him in Hollywood as a man who could translate German. Brecht read some of his tentative translations and then produced some original material. "Line by line, I would translate and he would tell me what was wrong with my translation," Bentley now recalls with a smile that insinuates the nature of the criticism. "It wasn't that...
...failure of America to produce dramatists of the stature of Brecht, Giradoux, Pirandello, and Anouilh is one which Bentley explains in terms of the role theater plays in American society. "In this country, the theater is for amusement, which puts the author at a great disadvantage. Significant theater is written to be taken seriously." This is a motif to which he returns frequently. "Men like Hemingway and Faulkner write novels, because they know that novels will be taken seriously. But the play in this country that is both serious and popular is a real rarity...
...tall, thin man with closely cropped hair, Bentley had originally intended to be a concert pianist. The prospect of the professional musician's grim life changed his mind at the last minute, and he went from Oxford to Yale, where he received a doctorate in Comparative Literature. Among his many books and anthologies, The Playwright as Thinker (1946) and In Search of a Theater (1947), are the most well known. He has attracted a wide audience of grateful readers with his series of anthologies, From the Modern Repertoire, The Modern Theater, and The Classic Theater. Bentley as an anthologizer tends...
...Bentley's presence at the University this year should add as much vitality to local theater as the beautiful paraphernalia afforded by the Loeb center. His standards are high and his purpose serious. When he says "America has no theater that stands for anything," he is doing more than criticizing; he is challenging...