Word: hara
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
KENNETH G. O'HARA Cleveland...
...Daniel Eigerman's "Cirrhosis to Benefit by Gala," another short story; this one has bits of excellent dialogue and snatches of humor, but its two main characters, a Jewish photographer and an alcoholic society woman seem awfully familiar: Mr. Eigerman is in danger of becoming a Jewish John O'Hara...
Dead Centers. Of the collection's first play. The Farmer's Hotel (which also appeared as a short novel), the author says that Rodgers and Hammerstein might have liked it, but Joshua Logan nixed the project. Logan must have been wrong, suggests O'Hara, because a stock-company production of the play moved the Fishkill, N.Y., Rotary Club to laugh, cry and call for the author. Later, "a prominent playwright" became interested, "but he wanted to rewrite the play and I did not want to reveal to him that it is an allegory, very tightly written...
...whom the author has deep sympathy, but to whom nothing happens. In Sun he is a crippled doctor who sees the disintegration of a neighboring family. He is a novelist's device, like Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, the reporter Jim Malloy, O'Hara's man-on-the-sidelines in Butter field 8 and Sermons and Soda-Water. In the tighter structure of a play, he is cumbrous and distracting...
...remaining plays are merely curtain lowerers. Veronique fails to revolve around a problem only writers can care about: Should a playwright write profitable comedies or unprofitable deep stuff? The Way It Was is a timid venture back to Butter field 8 country, intended to be a musical. O'Hara's long account in the preface of why Irving Berlin turned it down is almost as embarrassing as the moraine of first drafts, letters to the editor and encysted insults that Norman Mailer shored against his ruins in Advertisements For Myself...