Word: plays
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...other tryout was Third Best Sport, by Eleanor and Leo Bayer. (The third best sport turned out to be convention-going, after sex and baseball.) The play is a propaganda comedy about non-conformity, hypocrisy and group-ism. It is an inept concoction of situational cliches, overworn ideas and stereotyped characters. There is the sour corporation president, the xenophobic grande dame, the iconoclastic philosophy professor, the ambitious junior executive, and the young wife who upsets everything by refusing to be a lickspittle. The structure is creaky, and the turns of the plot wholly predictable. Celeste Holm did her best...
Arthur Laurents' A Clearing in the Woods was the most newsworthy play that Tufts staged. Laurents is a playwright who always knows exactly what he's doing. He has been widely acclaimed for his Home of the Brave, Time of the Cuckoo, and West Side Story. Yet despite a laudable production, his Clearing last year enjoyed only a brief Broadway...
Plans are under way to mount it off-Broadway during the coming season; and the motivation is justified, for this is an important play. It is "difficult" and unorthodox, and demands unflagging concentration. There is no plot in the usual sense of the word; and the element of time is employed in a fluid and daring...
...named Virginia, who is tormented by "three white nightmares," all personified on stage. Virginia undergoes before our eyes a sort of psychoanalysis, though there is fortunately none of the professional mumbo-jumbo that normally accompanies such matters. She finally manages to exorcise the tormentors; thus the title of the play not only designates its physical locale but also symbolizes the catharsis of Virginia's crowded, confused mind...
...crises in her life. Laurents, perhaps taking a cue from Jacqueline's dream in Rolland's novel Jean Christophe, has put them all on the same temporal plane--the present--so that the three can converse and interact with themselves, with Virginia, and with the other characters in the play. This dangerous gimmick, adumbrated in Death of a Salesman, works beautifully here and the result is highly effective theatre. It is a fine play, and some day will be generally recognized as such...