Word: playwrightes
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...this reviewer grew up on the plains of Kansas, and although she hates to cop out on questions of social relevance, she figures that the playwright wouldn't set any store by the understanding of a Midwestern hick. For Horovitz the Bronx seems to be emblematic of a couple of delinquents hazing an uncomprehending immigrant and each other on a street corner after everyone else in town has scurried into their apartments for the night. No doubt, then, hailing from Kansas means you've whiled your precious life away watching the wheat push and sway up from the clodded earth...
...These actors use each other deftly--dodging, fondling, intercepting and abusing one another's banter and bodies. The only remaining character, the Indian, functions as a mere punching bag, a prop that's hardly more human than the bus stop sign. His two-dimensionality is another flaw on the playwright's part, and about all Suchecki (who acts as well as directs) can do in this role is loiter on stage looking inane and pitiable...
...dictating in the year 1459, of course unaware that nearly a century and a half later an unscrupulous playwright, ravenous for material, will ransack his memoirs for the better parts of the three plays (The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV, Parts I and II) in which he will appear as his roistering self. The ungrateful Shakespeare cast sturdy Falstaff as a buffoon instead of a wit, and a coward instead of a discreetly valorous realist. There were good explanations (ignored by Shakespeare) for each of his acts of apparent cowardice. Says Falstaff. Naturally a fighter of his experience...
Unthrifty Son. The playwright also appropriates the changing character of Prince Hal from Falstaffs history, virtually without alteration. When Bolingbroke, the nearly crowned Henry IV, sneers despairingly at "my unthrifty son ... young wanton and effeminate boy" in the fifth act of Richard II, he is no distance at all from Falstaffs characterization of the young Hal as "the lad who was twice sick in my hat." Hal's cold renunciation of Falstaff on coronation day in Henry V is- begging the difference of a thy and a thee- word for word the same in the play and the autobiography...
...proper," Marchbanks tells Morell at one point. but Morell too has his share of Shavian aphorisms. "I like a man to be true to himself, even in wickedness," he lectures Burgess. If Morell the socialist and Marchbanks the poet are two different masks for Shaw himself, then the playwright was not only complex; in the terms of this production, he emerges as schizoid and asymmetrical...