Word: dramatist
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...From girlhood, Hellman went for the impulsive gesture, skipping school to trail shady relatives around New Orleans, insulting proper ones. The writing often recalls Gertrude Stein's stonier prose - obdurate, flat and mannered. Hellman is a virtuoso of ellipsis, a quality that doubtless served her well as a dramatist. In Pentimento she seems to take pride in leaving out connectives, or capping a half-told tale with a brief coda, unrelated except for the faintest resonance of tone...
...world literature, Macbeth is the one that enthralls me most. I do not claim it is the greatest play--or even Shakespeare's greatest play. After all, the only source is the posthumous First Folio edition, which presents difficult textual problems and is several stages removed from the dramatist's original script. On the one hand, it certainly contains some passages that were foreign interpolations; on the other, it possibly lacks one or two scenes that the Bard originally included. As it stands, it is only about half the length of Hamlet; and The Comedy of Errors is the only...
...Orphan, at off-Broadway's Public Theater, Viet Nam is not actively present except as Rabe attempts to relate it to the problem of evil throughout human existence. Often as silly and awkward as it is ambitious, the play nonetheless bears the mark of a dramatist who dares and cares...
Lanford Wilson, 37, clearly hopes to be a dramatist of this latter school, but at present he lacks the specific gravity for it. He is more akin to the Saroyan who wrote lines like "I don't suppose you ever fell in love with a midget weighing 39 pounds?" He is also prey to Saroyan's easy sentimentality and that boozy euphoria that permits Saroyan's characters to bite on the nail of life and declare it to be a nougat...
...once was just such an artist that the appearance of Out Cry is immensely saddening. Here, the man who suffers and the mind which creates are no more separate than a drunk and his crying jag In the plays that earned Williams his reputation as America's finest dramatist, he showed that he could impose the order of art on his darkling terrors and forge passion and compassion out of pain. Out Cry is devoid of those gifts...