Word: playgoer
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...evening builds to a tragic climax, a melancholy sense of the dooming, repetitive quality of family life patterns grows with it. The playgoer is invaded and disturbed by a sense of the lost ifs that determine people's lives. If the father had not been an alcoholic, if some rays of civilized light had filtered into the Carney home, if brute passions could be confined to the brutes, if, if, if-a lament for humanity's near misses at achieving humanity. For awful as they are, the Carneys are not all bad. They have courage, they are loyal...
...Modcom producer ought never to forget that it is good box office to proffer simulated wickedness as an act of liberation. That is what is known as a low high. Many a boy's only contact with opium was Dr. Fu Manchu, and the closest that many a playgoer gets to a whiff of pot is Modcom...
Mingle with the audience. This takes a little effort, but it is well worth the time wasted. With no plot, the playgoer might get bored. This way he cranes his neck every which way and wonders if he is going to be kissed, prodded, or punched. It's a good way to smell an actor, too, and the odor isn't always as appealing...
...were expected to write out a check. Such sermonettes, with their demand for moral reparations for evil deeds of the past, infest the modern theater. If one were really to believe Hochhuth (The Deputy), Weiss (The Investigation) and Arthur Miller (Incident at Vichy), one would conclude that the playgoer is responsible for every human crime and flaw since Adam ate the apple. The latest playwright to join this tiresome mea culpa crew is Arthur Kopit. His play Indians argues that Americans were once beastly to the redskins, a heady bit of information...
...meaning banter with Ophelia ("country matters?") the voice is not that of a suitor out to shock but of a weary fornicator already tired of the flesh he has groped too often. As for the closet scene with Queen Gertrude, Williamson would have positively horrified the perhaps apocryphal British playgoer who said: "No gentleman would speak to his mother that...