Word: orton
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...have high hopes of dying in my prime," Joe Orton confided to his diary in July 1967. Less than a month later Orton, who was only 34, was granted his wish. In a scene that could have occured in one of Orton's dark farces, the playwright's male lover smashed his head open with a hammer, then committed suicide with a lethal draft of grapefruit juice and Nembutals...
...Orton's grisly end and stark beginnings enclose one of the most compelling biographies of the past year, a psychological study of egos in conflict, marred but not destroyed by Author John Lahr's overlong digressions into literary analysis...
...Orton liked to claim that he grew up in the gutter, but the Saffron Lane Estates, a 1920s-style low-income development in the industrial town of Leicester, were in fact too dreary and anonymous for such a colorful description. His father was a city gardener who had long since given up his manhood; his mother was a tyrant who raged through a house that smelled of grease and damp. Young Joe, the eldest of four, tried acting and found his haven in the fantasy of the theater. At 18, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts...
...into one role," Havergal says. The company performs mostly classsical work, much of it re-shaped and re-interpreted, and the style is visually flamboyant, brazenly theatrical. Havergal says, "We do a lot of foreign work, a lot of Brecht. Not very much contemporary work, with the exception of Orton, Bond and Williams, as well as a new play every year by Robert David MacDonald...
...Harkness Commons--is not a dramatic disaster. Do It Yourself, a now-famous Lowell House production, relied no more heavily on College jokes than Holmes relies on the Law School, and was only funnier because its humor was directly connected to undergraduates' lives. Howard Katz, Robert Noto and Ivan Orton have come up with a book that pokes fun at every aspect of Law School life, and one leaves with a sense not of frustration at having missed the point, but of having glimpsed an entirely different University subculture. Which--particularly if you're interested in going on into corporate...