Word: playwrightes
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...student director to have done any research into either the literary or theatrical tradition behind his own play. Drama committees do an injustice to the director, his future cast, themselves, and ultimately to the audience, by leaving to hope and chance the director's conceptual grasp of a playwright's text, so essential to a solid, focused production. Not that a director hopeful should submit a 10-page tome along with his or her application. Neither should any director be confined to mechanically figuring out the playwright's intentions and them staging them...
However, the task of directing becomes impracticable unless thematic priorities and emphases, drawn from the script itself, are used to nurture and shape the artistic vision. And it becomes impossible to distinguish theme from device, message from embellishment, or innovation from convention without some awareness of the period, the playwright, or the genre...
After Museum and The Art of Dining, Tina Howe continues to learn, and to grow as a playwright. In Painting Churches, at off-Broadway's Second Stage theater, the tone, if not the maturity, is distinctly Chekhovian. Howe captures the same edgy surface of false hilarity, the same unutterable sadness beneath it, and the indomitable valor beneath both...
...WHATEVER PUSHES MAN along a tragic path of suffering and loss cannot be explained, remains secret, Life contains its own mysterious determinism." In the latest of the Grove Press's series on influential dramatists, Norman Berlin approaches Eugene O'Neill not simply as a playwright but as a thinker and philosopher, an anchor in early twentieth-century thought. Through detailed analysis of O'Neill's most important plays, rather than elaborate biography, Berlin skillfully presents the themes and doctrines of O'Neill's works and those he shares with Freud, Marx, Ibsen and other contemporaries...
...some other plays later in the book. Tidbits from studies of Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra and The Iceman Cometh provide occasional flashes of insight, so do a few of the details from Berlin's otherwise sketchy treatment of O'Neill's life--for instance, the young playwright was kicked out of Princeton for throwing a rock through the window of then-president Woodrow Wilson. And describing the disease' which made O'Neill's hands shake for the last decade of his life--effectively cutting off his ability to write--Berlin contends that O'Neill actually "died" with...