Word: hanley
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...important serious plays have just opened, both dealing with the same theme--man's guilt and moral responsibility, especially as they relate to the extermination of Jews by the Nazis. One is Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy (at the ANTA Washington Sq. Theatre) and the other is William Hanley's Slow Dance on the Killing Ground (at the Plymouth...
...Hanley is a newcomer to Broadway and exhibits a remarkable gift for original and fascinating dialogue, Slow Dance is melodrama, but profound melodrama. Reflecting some of the virtues of both Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams, it is also a bit pretentious and uncontrolled; and, under Joseph Anthony's guidance, it is almost unbearably suspenseful...
Slow Dance on the Killing Ground, by William Hanley, encourages three characters, two men and a woman, to tell the audience all about their operations. They discuss not physical but psychic scars-traumatic surgery performed by that mad cruel doctor, life...
...play is evenly divided between what Playwright Hanley does badly and what he cannot do at all. He cannot initiate action, only total recall. His play has already happened before it goes onstage. His characters are not people but composites researched out of faded newspapers; they are set forth, not in the music of evocative monologues, but in the unrelenting din of talk, talk, talk...
...worst thing that has happened to Hanley is something that he could not have foreseen-the opening of Murray Schisgal's therapeutically hilarious Luv. Sorry-I-was-ever-born plays now sound like hollow parodies rather than dour profundities; since Luv raised its satirical whoop, playgoers are bound to lessen their self-commiserating indulgence of misery. More than ever a playwright who intends to woo his audience with some tale of woe will have to do it out of an intensely felt, intensively rendered personal experience...