Word: dramatist
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...play's delight lies in the parodies, its unavoidable weakness in the occasional dips into ho-hum solemnity. Playwright George Herman's academician alter-ego elbows aside the comic dramatist, forcing a meaning which the humorist could carry less intrusively. Herman's over-seriousness trips us the cast as well. The two straight scenes suffer from awkward blocking and sags in tempo while the comic sections skip around similar problems. What's worse, the dialogue smothers itself under a dead weight of philosophizing. Fortunately, Herman's didactic compulsion interfere only infrequently, and the comedy is allowed to bounce ahead...
...universally regarded as a male, might be interested to know that Eugene O'Neill anticipated them in Strange Interlude more than forty years ago. The eminent playwright, however, apparently thought that women themselves were responsible in part for the establishment of a masculine Godhead. In Strange Interlude the dramatist has his heroine say, when her father dies and she can find no comfort in prayer...
...lethargic play. Of all contemporary playwrights, he has taught us the most about the importance of imminence in the dramatic experience. Who will come, or break, through the door next? What devastating words will unexpectedly be uttered? That is what has made Pinter an edge-of-the-seat dramatist. Even when he was, as English Critic Alan Brien once said, "a Hitchcock with the last reel missing," he still provided the electric Hitchcock tension. Beginning with the one-acters, Landscape and Silence, Pinter became enamored of static ruminative monologues that belong more properly to the novel than to drama...
While the territory he traverses is not new, Rabe strides across it with such intensity that the playgoer is raptly involved. What Sticks and Bones lacks is size and scope. Rabe is good enough so that he ought to ponder what makes a dramatist an enduring force rather than simply a Geiger counter of his times. The Greeks and the Elizabethans, who deemed men valiant heroes as great as their doom, produced awesome drama. It is the current American fashion to see men as brain-bleached automatons, and our drama has shrunk to precisely those mean, narrow and dispiriting dimensions...
...from these cataclysms. So unique is the Wodehouse brand of humor, however, that to describe it is as thankless and bootless as describing the taste of the perfect martini. Wodehouse (pronounced Woodhouse) can be compared to no other novelist, living or dead. His literary ancestor, instead, is the Roman dramatist Plautus, and, like Plautus, he is the manufacturer of a thousand comically crossed connections...