Word: knowed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There were the actors, the lighting technicians and the stagehands, but who was that strange-looking man poking around backstage at the Brooks Atkinson Theater last week? Finally, one of the prop men had to know. "Look, who are you?" he asked. "You've been hanging around here for days." "I'm the author of the play," the man answered, "and I'm the director as well. You may not have noticed." "Well," retorted the prop man, "I can't say I did." It may not have happened that way, of course, but that...
...fact, that is not likely to happen very often. Most people instinctively watch Ayckbourn. Something is going on behind that face of vanilla pudding, but they are not quite sure what. If they had seen any of his 22 plays, however, they would know: Ayckbourn is watching them, his eyes alert for what he calls those "quick social embarrassments" that comprise the human comedy...
Ayckbourn never strays from the subjects he knows so well: English suburbia and the slightly sad, but always funny problems of the married, the formerly married and the soon-to-be unmarried. "It is a rich source of comedy," he says. "Everything that is most horrifying and wonderful happens in marriage." He should know. His mother, a novelist, divorced his father, first violinist with the London Symphony Orchestra, when Alan, the only child, was five. She married a bank manager, who did not hide his dislike of Alan. They were later divorced...
...published his first book, a landmark study of birds; at 22, he climbed the Matterhorn and shocked society by joining a New York City political club dominated by working-class Irishmen. The ward heelers did not know what to make of this nattily dressed dude with a high-pitched twang and, as a reporter noted, a "wealth of mouth." For Teddy, it was just another challenge: he wanted to find out "whether I really was too weak to hold my own in the rough and tumble." Elected to the state assembly, he joined the good-government movement and started assailing...
Prize Stories 1979: The O. Henry Awards contains no such surprises. It is a solid, predictable gathering with one interesting sociological twist. Most of the stories are about failing marriages. Three reasons suggest themselves: more writers are writing about what they know, and what they know is failing marriages; the subject is particularly appealing to the editor; or both...