Word: dramatistic
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...From a dramatist's point of view, the Scopes trial is very much a Good Thing, because it brought together two magnificent figures--William Jennings Bryan and the great lawyer, Clarence Darrow. As an added attraction there was H.L. Mencken, who reported the story for his Baltimore newspaper. The climax of the play comes in the confrontation scene between the two giants, when the quiet, gallus-snapping Darrow, acting for the defense, calls prosecutor Bryan to the witness chair and exposes his Bible-belting oratory as so much hot air. A most exciting scene, this, and much of the excitement...
...articulate, most relentlessly self-documenting man of his time. The publication of yet another book about G.B.S., therefore, seems both foolhardy and unnecessary. But this one is timely, for it comes at a moment when pygmy critics are beginning to kick the dead giant around (TIME, Aug. 13). Irish Dramatist St. John Ervine suggests both why the critics are acting that way and why they are wrong. One trouble is that Shaw flouted the romantic conception of what a great artist should...
...whole, Biographer Ervine has written a solid, slow, yet readable account. It is duller, but more complete, than Hesketh Pearson's brilliant portrait (1950). And it firmly supports Shaw's claim to being the greatest dramatist in the English language since Shakespeare-a claim recently supported by his erratic fellow Irishman, Sean O'Casey. Wrote O'Casey in a memorable tribute: "Look at the Theatre as it was . . . So sob-sisterly, so stupid, so down to dust was the Theatre then that God turned his back to it, made for Shaw, caught him by the beard...
...Greek put on some 40 productions of Greek drama in the original language. In the spring of 1954, she fittingly climaxed 50 years of teaching at Randolph-Macon by presenting, not one more Greek play, but three--Aeschylus' trilogy The Oresteia, the mighty masterpiece of the first great dramatist in history...
...round out your role, be it large or small. That a playwright has written only a cardboard character into his lines is no excuse; it is then up to the director or the actor to invent something. This is especially true of small parts, on which the dramatist is likely to have spent little pains. Jacquelyn Zollo's Miss Jay is a good example; she was on stage only briefly and had but a handful of lines, yet achieved warmth and depth. I felt she was a whole person, whom I could describe at some length if need...