Word: pittsburgh
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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THERE are mysteries aplenty in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but they are mysteries of character and not intrigue...
John Smith's airliner sat at the gate for two hours at Pittsburgh International Airport, and he was famished. What to do? The Larkspur, Calif., lawyer walked into the terminal building, picked up a telephone and called a local Domino's Pizza outlet. Sure enough, 18 minutes later, a delivery boy, clad in red and blue, arrived at Gate 36 carrying a giant pizza with everything on it. Said Smith: "When I walked onto the plane with the pizza, everyone cheered...
...plays. He frets about a "whole generation ((of black youths)) that has not learned to read," but offers neither sweeping solutions nor invective. He was not always so mellow. Drawn to the Black Power movement in the 1960s, he helped found a volunteer troupe in his native Pittsburgh that mounted the incendiary works of LeRoi Jones. "I tried to write myself, but I wasn't any good at dialogue," he says -- a surprising judgment for a playwright whose characters speak with color and dialectal authenticity. Within a few years Wilson was hatching the idea for a whole cycle of dramas...
...Turner, Wilson's third major work, is a sprawling ensemble piece, full of grace notes and epiphanies. It takes place in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911 where the tenants are mostly drifters in work and love: they act as aimless as if newly freed, though they are much too young to have been slaves themselves. The dramatic center is Delroy Lindo's harrowing performance as the one driven character, Herald Loomis. Poor and desperate, clutching his painfully thin eleven-year-old daughter, he bursts in seeking his wife, whom he lost years before when he was taken captive...
...Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University, English Chairman Gary Waller assigns his classes the recent cult film Blue Velvet for comparisons with works by T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats...