Word: comedist
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Neil Simon is America's foremost stage comedist, the theatrical equivalent of Woody Allen in the movies. Even in his weakest plays that gift of laughter has never faltered, and it is in full flower in his trilogy. But for all its exuberant humor, Broadway Bound is a comedy only in the sense that Chekhov meant Uncle Vanya to be seen as a comedy. Its subjects include the dissolution of two marriages, the estrangements of a father from a daughter and of another father from his sons, the terminal cancer of one offstage character and the accidental death of another...
...better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? The question is not exactly new, but it has rarely been posed more deftly and disarmingly than in the 21st work of the wistful comedist A.R. Gurney, whose best previous plays (Sweet Sue, Love Letters) also centered on the disruptive consequences of love unpursued. Gurney is often pegged as an elegist for the waning Wasp. In Later Life he makes great efforts to usher in characters outside that stereotype. They are Irish, Jewish, Texan and techno-nerd; one woman is a lesbian, one man gay, and these...
...these people see themselves as morally normal -- and playwright Alan Ayckbourn, Britain's leading comedist, plainly thinks they are. Although the corruption depicted in A Small Family Business embraces fraud, the Mafia and murder, it takes place in bland, beige, suburban houses where the residents are preoccupied with recipes, hemlines and their dogs. And while the accents are recognizably British, the decor and, by implication, the bad behavior would seem right at home in Middle America...
...toward the limits imposed on her by life and by her loved ones. Abruptly, spectators who were crying with laughter are simply crying, without any sense of being manipulated. The ability to find humor in unlikely places, then shift emotional gears with no machinery showing, makes Simon a great comedist...
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