Word: playwright
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...March 1 to restage Lyle Kessler's Orphans, another past Steppenwolf venture, in London with a cast featuring Albert Finney. Meanwhile, Sinise, Malkovich and Peterson have all formed film- production companies. Also active in Hollywood is the first voice from the new Chicago theater to emerge into national prominence, Playwright David Mamet, who won a 1983 Oscar nomination for The Verdict and in 1984 received the Pulitzer Prize for his play Glengarry Glen Ross. Mamet's longtime collaborator Greg Mosher, who as artistic director of the Goodman was perhaps the most influential force in shaping Chicago's theater sensibility...
...starting, too quick in its resolution. The first half hour of the film has a staggered, disjointed rhythm to it, and the climax is perhaps too abrupt and suddenly tragic. Though Shepard's plays are notorious for their refusal to resolve themselves, what distinguishes him as our most audacious playwright translates less gracefully on the screen...
What does this self-conscious display have to do with Chekhov's The Seagull? On the whole, not much. The awkward playwright of Chekhov's script and Artistic Director Peter Sellars of the American National Theater in Washington share a bold if at times risible "search for new forms." But within the arcane visual framing, Sellars has mounted an intelligent reading by a cast notably including Colleen Dewhurst. He makes a case that the play is above all about jealousy and offers an electrifying moment near the end, when the words of the play-within-a-play suddenly take...
...eighth annual Kennedy Center gala in Washington, the honorees--avant- garde Choreographer Merce Cunningham, 66, Actress Irene Dunne, 81, Comedian Bob Hope, 82, Playwright-Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, 67, Composer Frederick Loewe, 84, and opera's Beverly Sills, 56--were wined and dined for two days, but not quite as usual. Cunningham, "the non sequitur of the evening," said his publicist, was served special macrobiotic dinners. And Dunne, disappointedly, was unable to attend the grand finale after back-pain medication made her ill. Hospitalized, she sent word that "the show should go on," and that it did, in a star...
Until now. Shepard, 42, last week unveiled A Lie of the Mind, the newest, longest (3 hours 45 minutes) and best of his 40-odd plays. Staged off-Broadway by the playwright, Lie superficially resembles yet another Shepardian slice of life among borderline psychotics of the underclass. It opens with the confession of an uncontrollably jealous man (Harvey Keitel) who has beaten his innocent wife (Amanda Plummer) and left her for dead. Before it is over, characters have been shot, pummeled, enslaved and murdered. Yet the play's real action is a coming to terms with the past...