Word: playwrightes
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Many of the characters in this year's plays inhabit a landscape of dead or deferred dreams. In John Pielmeier's Courage, the Scots playwright James M. Barrie laments "the fierce joy of loving too much. It is a terrible thing!" Courage avoids the standard pitfall of the full-length monologue: that of making its subject too ingratiating. It keeps Barrie at a respectful distance from his audience and his own feelings until late in the play, when he relates the awful fates of the four children who inspired characters in his Peter Pan. Actor Paul Collins gives...
...Steve Rankin) and a wife (the elfin Holly Hunter) who still carries a torch for Elvis Presley. This comedy's ambitions are no loftier than Shroeder's; it is just a tasty slice of lowlife, but full of sweet feeling for its tattered eccentrics. As Shroeder, Actor-Playwright Guyer is a brown study of the good ole boy, wondering what ever happened to the kingdom of machismo...
...three acts and at 2½ hours, A Weekend Near Madison might benefit from losing ten or 15 minutes and one offstage death. But even in its present form, as directed by Mann and performed by a pristine ensemble, Playwright Tolan's work radiates promise and achievement. Its theme, of community under pressure, also helps define this Louisville weekend, where actors may appear in three or four different plays, turn their talent to playwrighting and even schmooze with the critics. The beleaguered American theater can take hope from these artists, all stretching to see the same horizon...
...comic gifts, Simon looks back, not in anger, remorse or undue guilt but with fondly nourished compassion, at himself as an adolescent in 1937 and at the almost asphyxiatingly close-knit family around him. While the play housed at Broadway's Alvin Theater does not fully attain the playwright's highest aims, it does give off compelling glints of an urban Morning's at Seven, a ghetto Our Town and a wryly caustic Ah, Wilderness! Like them, Brighton Beach Memoirs belongs to the family genre where the passwords are forgive and remember...
...Mountains are metaphors," Harold says, but imminent death is not. The two men jest, curse and trade raw-tongued obscenities-all impotent delaying actions. Playwright Meyers tries to penetrate the core of each man's being, but he is only fitfully successful. Information is not insight. Meyers probes the past lives of Taylor and Harold, but not their hearts and souls or the roots of their perplexing friendship. Taylor is a hard-nosed district attorney with a rightist bias who revels in his animal prowess with girls in singles bars. Harold is a do-good veteran...