Word: playwrightes
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Broadway--who needs it? It's a mausoleum for foreigners and fogies. It's got no stars, no premier playwrights, no float-out-of-the-theater magic. Some days that may be true. But last Monday a few dozen eminences from movies, TV and even the stage convened at the Broadhurst Theatre for a little old-fashioned dazzle. The occasion was a benefit called "The Playwright's the Thing," an evening of skits and play excerpts by three superb American comic dramatists: Christopher Durang, Terrence McNally and Wendy Wasserstein. The event, of which TIME was the presenting sponsor, raised money...
...arts have no shortage of fund-raising schemes; in a McNally skit not performed last week, a harried patroness dashes off to a Disabled Modern Dancers' Luncheon. But giving needn't be an ordeal. "The Playwright's the Thing" proved that when Broadway has a good cause, it can have a great effect. And it can inspire as it entertains. In the evening's most indelible turn, Debra Monk played a New Yorker crisscrossing the border of reason and madness. She takes comfort in the poet Thomas Gray's line: "laughing wild amidst severest woe." For those in the audience...
Theater has come a long way since the days of ancient Greece, and British playwright Alan Ayckbourn is proof. If Aristotle was willing to dismiss any play that didn't strictly observe the three unities of time, place and action, one can only imagine what he would have to say to Ayckbourn. The second scene of his play How the Other Half Loves, in which two different dinner parties that take place in two different homes on two different days are presented simultaneously, would probably be enough to make the founder of Western literary criticism roll over in his grave...
...even that it's the second to the last Friday in April and we are finally within striking distance of the end of the year. No, April 23 is significant because it's the Bard's birthday. That's right, folks, William Shakespeare, the man himself, the poet and playwright to end all poets and playwrights, turns 435 tomorrow...
DIED. GARSON KANIN, 86, playwright and director whose Born Yesterday (1946 on stage, 1950 in film) is considered a comedy classic; in New York. With his wife, the actress Ruth Gordon, Kanin wrote the scripts for several of the more celebrated movie pairings of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, including Adam's Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952). He also claimed some credit for his brother Michael's screenplay for Woman of the Year...