Word: lamkin
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...mental stature also keeps him from the necessity of wholesale borrowing of stock characters and themes from other playwrights. American dramatists, by contrast, tend to be astonishingly inbred: Tennessee Williams produces William Inge; Inge mates with his parent to produce a frail and sickly creature like, say, Speed Lamkin, who can also show O'Neill and Miller and Heaven knows who-all in his family tree...
...Lamkin is a boy wonder from 'way back': he entered Harvard at the age of sixteen. "My family wanted me to go to Groton or somewhere. I didn't want to go there ... For one thing, we had a wonderful country place, and I had a horse. And I hate compulsory athletics. I don't like to do anything I'm not good at ... I said lemme take the College Entrance Boards and see how I do. So I took...
...thirty, then, Lamkin has a substantial body of work published and produced. Time enough to find out his place on the literary map, the writers with whom he is connected, "his school," as people say who believe that writers swim together like fish. Among favorite playwrights, Lamkin names "Miller, Williams, Bill Inge, Nothing unusual in who I admire. Oh, yeah, and Born Yesterday...
...Lamkin will not stay put in a pigeonhole, he is pretty well confined these days to the various hotel rooms where Comes a Day is being rewritten. "God, it's like final exams that never end, that go on for two months, that's what rewriting is like...
...rewriting job is no easier because Comes a Day is related to Lamkin's short story of the same title. In fact he rejects the distinction between original play and adaptation. "No play is an original play... All of Tennessee's plays came from either his one-acts or his stories. They're developments. You think about it. Certainly you can't say my play is an adaptation of my short story. It's quite different .... I'd never adapt anybody else's play. I've too much ego for that...