Word: playwrightes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DRAWING ROOM drama is a sly beast. With conversation at a maximum and action at a minimum, this domestic animal tends to lie down and play dead just when the playwright is striving for most tension. Actors strain for excitement while the play is sound asleep, hiding under polished walnut divans and Aubusson carpets...
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen turned the medium in on itself; the confines of the parlor were a perfect metaphor for the confinements of nineteenth century society. An adaptation of Ghosts at the Loeb transforms Ibsen's sitting room into a chic contemporary country home; the end result is a fine production which resembles Ibsen in form but not in sense...
...imagination, and that undermines the very concept of drama. Drama entails entering a world not our own, and that involvement is not necessarily made smoother when the characters wear Bloomingdales' outfits and mutter in student slang. "Relevance" has little to do with decade or decor. Adaptation often weakens the playwright's intentions; Kolzak's Ghosts in surface mirrors Ibsen but in substance is worlds apart...
...prolific novelist, playwright and short story writer did not compose those lines specifically for his headstone, as others have somewhat snidely suggested, but O'Hara would have accepted them as a valid summation of his work. Throughout his 40 odd years on the American literary scene, O'Hara lobbied openly for the critical acclaim he felt was due him, and watched in frustration as he was passed over, time and time again, for Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Wolfe and Steinbeck...
...image is everything. There is hardly a period-character who isn't included in Larry's group of artsy Village friends. His girlfriend, Sarah, is a Jewish princess who sleeps with him even though she is restless for a less loitering life. Robert is a suave, narcissistic poet-playwright: Anita, suicidal; Bernstein is a cute black homosexual; and Connie, the old maid, everybody's best friend. Although they spend hours together in heavy intellectual raps, when something important happens--the suicide of Anita, Sarah running off to Mexico with Robert, Larry getting a role in a Hollywood movie...