Word: dramatists
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...Tomlinson Theater. Friedrich Durrenmatt, 48, irreverent son of a Protestant minister, read his acceptance speech seated on a rumpled bed on the play's set-the same bed where, a few minutes later, a naked woman sprawled as her husband painted her portrait. Said the Swiss dramatist: "My academic career has now been successfully completed. I broke it off 23 years ago to write my first play instead of a dissertation, because I came to believe that one can think not only in philosophy but on the stage." Added Durrenmatt: "My first drama caused a scandal. I still thrive...
...less tangible but far more profound crisis is the lack of a commanding dramatist with a compelling vision. Half of today's plays seem to be written in some dusty attic of the past and the other half in some apocalyptic junkyard of the future. The shock fads of homosexual, lesbian and sado-masochistic themes, the vogue of nudity and participatory theater may well continue, but they cannot mask the lack of substance. They are frames without pictures, devices without a purposeful direction. This is a theater that is severely pinched for both means and ends, but at least...
...author is Welsh Dramatist Alun Owen, best known in the States as scenarist of the Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night. His males of the species are Paul Scofield, Michael Caine and Sean Connery-each, in his own way, a predator starring in his own segment of the triple bill. Their prey, and the source of the drama's continuity, is Anna Calder-Marshall, an actress formidable enough at 21 to hold the stage opposite such intimidating costars. Sir Laurence Olivier is the narrator-host, providing bridges between the parts of Owen's "modern morality...
...Hitler and Stalin -in the no-nonsense manner of a Fabian socialist committee-on the grounds that they were cleaning up a mess. Such obtuseness in a man whose life is a record of devotion to decency in human life can be explained only as an aberration, perhaps a dramatist's occupational disability of putting his own words into the mouths of other characters. Lenin saw Shaw as "a good man fallen among Fabians." Shaw, perversely, seemed to regard dictators as good Fabians fallen among fanatics...
...reminiscence, not a protest, a souvenir of a simpler time when a quiet bitterness was as good as a riot and the most drastic sort of racial demonstration was trying to buy a Coke at the drugstore soda fountain. Parks is not yet sufficiently sophisticated as a dramatist to make such an unquestioning life completely credible to a contemporary audience. To be sure, there is one angry, rebellious black youth who stalks the community giving the sweaty white lawmen a mean time, but he is portrayed as a vicious psychotic who can easily be vanquished by Newt's storybook...