Word: one-acts
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YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS FESTIVAL. It's a bit like going to the U.S. Open for the girls' singles, hoping to spot next year's Capriati. This annual autumn event in Manhattan offers an evening of one-act plays by aspiring dramatists, who must be under 18 at the time of submission. The works, typically, are much ado about first love and sensitive, misunderstood youth; typically, also, at least one of the sketches shows potential genius struggling toward maturity. Through...
...Indecent Materials, a pair of one-act plays linking homophobia to right-wing criticism of the National Endowment for the Arts, an actor from North Carolina steps out of character to vow that this year his state will unseat the NEA's foremost critic, Senator Jesse Helms. Despite that bravado, many cultural leaders fear that what started out as a skirmish against would- be censors is turning into an unwinnable war. After years of debate about whether public funding for the arts was growing fast enough, cultural institutions now worry whether the NEA will survive at all, at least...
Wasserstein's real talent comes through in the last piece of the book, Boy Meets Girl, a one-act play between Dan and Molly, two New York City "professionalites." When Wasserstein is being the playwright, she is just as funny as she says. And her audience is broken up, the way they were back in second grade...
...subsequent plays often reminded critics of Samuel Beckett, the Irish-born playwright of diminution and despair whose death was announced last week. Havel considered himself a disciple of Beckett's, although his work rarely shared the older writer's paralyzing hopelessness, and Beckett returned the compliment: his 1984 one-act Catastrophe, portraying the inquisition of a dissident, was an explicit tribute...
These and other episodes are presented out of order because, writes Sinyavsky, "the past cannot be grasped in sequence." Realism, too, is all thumbs. In order to re-create the bizarre atmosphere of his KGB interrogation, the author restages the experience as a one-act farce. Karl could have been one of the Marx Brothers. Some typical dialogue between writer and inquisitor...