Word: pielmeier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Written by John Pielmeier...
Many of the characters in this year's plays inhabit a landscape of dead or deferred dreams. In John Pielmeier's Courage, the Scots playwright James M. Barrie laments "the fierce joy of loving too much. It is a terrible thing!" Courage avoids the standard pitfall of the full-length monologue: that of making its subject too ingratiating. It keeps Barrie at a respectful distance from his audience and his own feelings until late in the play, when he relates the awful fates of the four children who inspired characters in his Peter Pan. Actor Paul Collins gives...
...artistocracy of the insane: Whom the gods wish to embrace, they first drive mad. Agnes is a strange young woman, singing in an Angelus-clear soprano and obey voices no one can hear. It remains for Martha and Miriam to translate these sounds into the lumbering prose of reason. Pielmeier orchestrates the examination deftly and leavens the weightier speculations with airy talk-show humor. But as Agnes soars into catharsis and Martha tries desparately to anchor her in the explicable, Pielmeier allows himself to take leave of dramatic sense. He offers too many motivations to save the mystery...
...Pielmeier flunks his metaphysical, he gives his players every chance for a sublime, exhausting workout onstage. Forget Equus; think of The Exorcist. Watch Plummer as she scales the sloping back wall of Eugene Lee's set, as blood gushes from the stigmata in her palms, as she wrenchingly relives her murdered child's birth. The show, not the play, is the thing here. And Plummer- a scarily gifted actress with a waif's face and a voice that intones words as if she had learned them at Berlitz school on Mars- puts on an extraordinary show...
...four young playwright's- Davis is 30, Durang 32, Pielmeier 33 and Kurtti 26- form no cohesive group, no lapsed-Catholic Mafia. They have responded to their shared history in tones ranging from reverence to rage, and no divine law ordains that they must continue to wrestle with the cassocked and habited specters of their youth. Instead, these veterans of Catholic schooling are following the first law of creation: write what you know. The nuns and priests of a generation ago impressed their small charges more than they realized. The steel-edged rulers with which they whacked so many...