Word: macleish
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...often that a Broadway play elicits raves from all the New York daily newspaper critics. But this is what happened to Archibald MacLeish's J.B. when the strike-bound reviewers were finally able to make their verdicts known after the December 11 opening at the ANTA Theatre...
...have no intention of adding to the extensive verbiage that the book reviewers and drama critics have already piled up about the meaning and the ideas offered in MacLeish's play. I shall only say that I left my front-row seat three or so weeks ago with the feeling that the entire history of the theatre had existed solely to make possible this production of this play. Which is arrant nonsense, of course. Yet the statement is true at least to the extent that MacLeish has here adapted many diverse literary traditions covering a span of close...
Many writers have noted that MacLeish's hero (alias Job) gets his sobriquet from the present-day practice of calling American business executives by their initials. But no-one seems to have mentioned that he also gets it from the widespread ancient Hebrew custom of omitting vowels from the written language...
...MacLeish's writing runs the gamut from the loftiest poetic imagery to colloquial vulgarisms. And he makes use of an effective gimmick for underscoring certain crucial lines by employing a celestial prompter over a loudspeaker, whose words are then delivered by the actor on stage; it brings to mind the old French dictum, "Un beau vers on peut entendre deux fois...
...Tammy went to New York, studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and spent two years playing in somber epics, including Mourning Becomes Electra. TV and a few other acting bits kept Tammy going until 1954, when she met and later married Canada-born Actor Christopher Plummer, now starring in Archibald MacLeish's play J.B. At the time, Tammy was working in the box office at the Westport (Conn.) Playhouse. "They fired me," she says, "because I lost them $500 giving away free passes." (The habit still afflicts her. At the Downstairs she is apt to answer the telephone outside...