Word: hellman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Giant Abstraction. Julie would be the last to agree with the Barrymore boast -but the dare was exciting. Last week on Broadway she took it. She opened as Joan of Arc in Lillian Hellman's adaptation of The Lark from the French of Jean Anouilh. Her previous roles, no matter how complex, had kept within the limits of "colloquial drama." She had played people of life size in a theater of the norm, and she had only to cut herself to make her characters bleed. Joan, however, was not merely a human being, into whose feelings an actress...
...which is the metaphor the action moves in, takes its course. In a matter of moments it is clear that the London fiasco is not to be repeated by Producer Kermit Bloomgarden. For that production Christopher Fry had done a literal translation from the French. For this one Lillian Hellman has cut 43 pages of Anouilh -and ennui. What is left, while faithful to the original in scenic form, has been trenchantly rewritten by one of the ablest theater minds in the U.S., and the result is intellectual theater at close to its best. The ideas that the drama deals...
...events leading to the burning of Joan of Arc involves considerable audacity. Yet the current version, The Lark, justifies the attempt. With beguiling Julie Harris in the title role, The Lark is a startling, modernistic interpretation. More important, it is conceived from a distinctly American view-point. Lillian Hellman has skillfully adapted Jean Anouiln's material into a revealing portrait of a high spirited Joan...
...SELECTED LETTERS OF ANTON CHEKHOV (331 pp.)-Edited by Lillian Hellman-Farrar, Straus...
...with a difference: it is not black, only charcoal grey. No one mocked his low spirits more high-spiritedly than Chekhov. While he put his genius into his short stories and plays, he put his complaints into his letters. But deftly introduced and edited by Playwright Lillian Hellman, Letter-Writer Chekhov emerges as a sweet, kind and amiable grouch, and his correspondence as a thoroughly engaging testimonial to the power of negative thinking...