Word: play
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Unquenchable Playwright Saroyan ha just written a new play, The Time of Your, Life, in six days, having meant to write it in five. Aware that many people could not make head or tail of My Heart's in the Highlands, for the new work Saroyan composed a 200-word explanatory note, to be blared through a microphone before the curtain rises...
Life and Death of an American (by George Sklar; produced by the Federal Theatre Project) tells the story of Jerry Dorgan, supposedly the first U. S. baby born in 1900. The play spans the same period and dramatizes many of the same events as The American Way; but Jerry is a worker's son and his story is no paean to the democratic formula. An indignant protest against a system which creates and cannot, cope with poverty and unemployment, it ends bitterly with Jerry killed during a strike...
...early scenes, with their warm, not unhumorous account of a pre-War childhood, and their spanking pace, are fresh and alive. But despite a few touching scenes and a few impassioned ones the play weakens as it proceeds. Jerry never becomes more than a familiar symbol. The plot never slides out of the worn proletarian groove. The stagecraft-combining Living Newspaper technique with class-conscious expressionism-would once have seemed striking, today is dated...
...Jones, big test of the two-day festival was the five-hour B Minor Mass. Composed about 1738, when Johann Sebastian Bach was in the plenitude of his powers, it is the only Catholic mass written by the Lutheran composer.* Bach chose the form because its complexity gave adequate play to his technical resources and expression to his love of God. For many years performed nowhere in the U. S. but at Bethlehem, it is now an annual climax to other choir seasons, is perhaps the most famous liturgical choral work in existence...
Towne & Baker need no longer worry about screen credit or having their stories mussed up by somebody else. They are now bosses of their own producing company, The Play's The Thing Productions. Unlike a similar producing venture attempted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur five years ago, T. P. T. P. will release four pictures through RKO* next year. The four, picked by Towne for their story value: The Swiss Family Robinson (published in 1813), James Fenimore Cooper's The Deer slayer (1841), Tom Brown's School Days (1857) and Alfred Batson's contemporary African...