Word: playwrightes
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Most of the credit has to go to the text, by award-winning playwright David Rabe. It is a complex and ambitious piece. The considerable action unfolds on the company's marvelous set resplendant with giant records, neon beer signs, and flashing lights. The set remarkably resembles a seedy lounge; it is the only truly recognizable aspect of the production. The surrealistically awful tale focuses on go-go girl Chrissy's growing instability, and the insensitive cretins there to witness...
...would be ridiculous to condemn Rabe's work solely for being too brutal. Theater is not a utilitarian concept, nor should it ever be. The playwright, like Chrissy, just wants to tell a story. And as Harold says, "Life's sad. Chrissy, it makes you want to cry." But Rabe never gives us time or inclination to do so between the short scenes as inhospitable to Chrissy as the characters that surround...
Heiner Muller was once without full recognition in his own country. The East German playwright had a festival of his works this month in Frankfurt, and has been praised by international audiences for plays like Hamletmaschine and Quartett. It's only now that his dramas, pointedly dealing with the theme of revolution betrayed, are being staged at home. If Muller, 61, were to dramatize the end of the Communist regime in East Berlin, he says, "it would be a tragedy about incompetence and stupidity." He adds that many figures in recent history wouldn't make strong fictional characters. One exception...
...West Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Bremen, Bochum and Schwerin. All were imported for, or staged locally to enrich, last month's Berlin Theatertreffen, the city's 27th annual festival of productions from around the German-speaking world. Although the doctrinaire Marxism of Bertolt Brecht, Germany's greatest 20th century playwright, has fallen out of fashion, his zeal to shake up bourgeois spectators still seems to inspire his artistic successors...
...COBB. Playwright Lee Blessing (A Walk in the Woods) joins forces with director Lloyd Richards (Fences) for a complex, intriguing look into the mystique of that nonpareil player and apparent racist, Ty Cobb, at San Diego's Old Globe Theater...