Word: dramatist
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...tells himself he is not one of those sympathetic lost characters out of Chekhov but the insane amputee in a story by Gogol who places an ad for the return of his lost nose. What Roth succeeds in portraying, though, with all the delicacy and poignancy of the Russian dramatist, is that Kepesh is in fact a figure from a Chekhov novel. Not a warped, disfigured monster but a man whose constant pursuit of love reveals the tragic-comic dimensions of our own lives...
...world. Raised in the Edenic splendors of the Devon countryside before the war and educated in the genteel bower of Oxford afterward, he falls into an existence in which occasional bumps are easily cushioned by his status and talent. His marriage fails and his brief career as a London dramatist is not the roaring success he had hoped for. But Martin's skill at writing dialogue lands him movie jobs, money, amorous actresses and, eventually, a well-heeled expatriate life in Hollywood...
...drama critic, George Bernard Shaw demolished most of the plays he saw; as a dramatist, he demolished most of society as he saw it. In his own eyes, Shaw was the anointed saint of iconoclasm, pursuing his vocation like a holy terrorist and treating his audience as his congregation. Though they rarely went forth and practiced what he preached, they could not resist the magnetic sweep of his eloquence and his wickedly amusing way with words...
...Rumanian-born Serban, who has become the latest fad hero of the self-styled experimentalists, the text is simply a mask that must be ripped off to reveal the unconscious, irrational blood flow of the play. The dramatist is presumed unable to capture the Id of his work in words, so the director imposes a distracting new subtext that blurs, blots out or mangles the real text. In The Cherry Orchard, earlier this season, Serban altered the living space of Chekhov's drama to a kind of surrealistic all-white silo in which Mme. Ranevskaya ricocheted around without...
What comes through is something larger than that. There is a general sense of ominous guilt and the specific, fatalistic conviction that an individual can only choose between crippling dependency or terrifying isolation. It is a mea sure of Strindberg's enduring power as a dramatist that he can inflict upon his characters and upon us the abnormal tensions he felt himself. The night closes in like an unrelenting vise until only the nightmare remains...