Word: playwrightes
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...Scarborough, everyone knows who Alan is. Playwright Alan Ayckbourn was an 18-year-old actor when he first came to this resort town on the coast of North Yorkshire, England, in the 1950s and joined a theater company run by Stephen Joseph, Britain's pioneer of theater-in-the-round. After starting to write his own plays, then working as a radio-drama producer for the bbc, Ayckbourn returned to Scarborough, where in 1972 he became artistic director and chief playwright-in-residence for what is now called the Stephen Joseph Theatre. It is there that nearly...
...which, one hopes, will spark a fresh reappraisal of the work of the most misunderstood, and very likely best, playwright currently writing in English. That is far from a widespread view. In America, Ayckbourn is still typecast, anachronistically, as a lightweight boulevard farceur (the "British Neil Simon"), or simply as a clever deviser of staging gimmicks: plays that squeeze the action in several rooms into one space, or move backward in time, or fill up the stage with water, or (in his insanely ambitious Intimate Exchanges) have no fewer than 16 dramatic permutations, depending on which alternative action the characters...
This "property" (one wouldn't want to dignify it with any grander term) comes complete with a gimmick: No man - not even among the extras - is ever seen or heard in it. The playwright's original text can be described as a hard-working woman's revenge on New York's idle rich, wasting their days on manicures, fashion shows and, above all, gossip. In updating the original, English - who was responsible for the estimable TV series Murphy Brown - has been fairly faithful to her source. Once again, the husband of Mary Haines (Meg Ryan) begins an affair with Crystal...
During South Africa's long night of apartheid, white playwright and social commentator Pieter-Dirk Uys felt unable to speak out. So he invented a character who could: Evita Bezuidenhout, the wife of a fictional Afrikaner nationalist figure. In the late 1970s and early '80s, "Evita" lampooned the establishment in a series of satirical diaries. Later, with the help of a wig, heels and a handbag, she became real. Black and white alike loved the subversion. Then, in 1996, Uys took over a derelict railway station in Darling, a semidesert town an hour's drive north of Cape Town...
DIED. Alan Jay Lerner, 67, composer, playwright and lyricist of Broadway hit musicals, including Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Camelot, Paint Your Wagon and Gigi, and author of the screenplay for An American in Paris; of lung cancer; in New York City. Lerner worked with Kurt Weill and Leonard Bernstein, but his greatest successes were produced during a tempestuous, 20-year collaboration with Frederick Loewe (Lerner wrote the book and lyrics, Loewe the music). The partnership broke up in the early 1960s, but last year, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, the two were jointly honored for their contributions to American...