Word: dramatists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...INMATES' extravagant lunacy, however, obscures part of Weiss's political message under a barrage of pranks and gibberish. A post-World War II dramatist, he aims his satire of the Reign of Terror at 20th-century political folly. Too often, however, the patients of Charenton drown out Marat's speeches with their rumpus of wild cheers and spiteful taunts...
...impulse toward poetry seems to burn more hotly in playwrights than the impulse toward literal truth. The conjurer's tricks of the dramatist-metaphor, epigram, literary allusion and the fateful juxtaposition-somehow feel more artistic than the precise evocation of life. That attitude seems to have gripped even one of the stage's most adroit neorealists, Marsha Norman. She won her reputation with the 1979 drama about a woman's leaving prison, Getting Out, and last year received the Pulitzer Prize for 'Night, Mother, a mundanely detailed conversation over cocoa and marshmallows between a daughter...
Shepard fends off such questions as "Do you believe in God?" ("What God?") and "How do you approach Shakespeare?" ("I don't approach him.") For Shepard--who never attended college--the role of expert dramatist is still a novelty. "Now, to find it's inverted like that is shocking," he says...
...FREQUENT BEST, playwright Sam Shepard uses grisly explorations of family frictions and anxieties to roil up the audience in the way every good dramatist should. The Curse of the Starving Class, the last of a stark family-history trilogy, abounds in this desired therapeutic grittiness. Its characters' unpleasantness produce just the kind of irksome self-questioning and squirming that Aristotle prescribed 1500 years ago, the kind that makes going to the theater more than just entertainment. In Curse, only occasionally do Shepard, and the generally able troupe presenting it at the Loeb, stumble out of the realm of theatrical effectiveness...
...tennis" and reading at his house on Martha's Vineyard But the real high point of the season came later. On a 10-day loray into the Tuscan countryside around Lake I rasimeno. Even the name sounds placid, calm and relaxed; his days were spent, the dramatist says, "watching the mist drift off the lake and into the surrounding hills...