Word: playwrightes
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...success of The Homecoming, particularly in the small theater of the Boston Center for the Arts, is a joint effort of playwright, actors and audience. The audience's expectations, the mental gymnastics they undergo in searching for a meaning, are taken into account by the author and find their way into the dialogue of the actors. Pinter defies his audience to break out of their habit of categorization, to upset their "intellectual equilibrium". Do we ever know, he asks, the real motivation of the complex people who live in our "real" world? In fact, do we even know what...
Died. Betty Smith, 75, playwright and novelist who planted a durable oak when she published A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1943; in Shelton, Conn. Like Francie Nolan, Tree's heroine, Betty Smith grew up in a Brooklyn slum. After writing for and performing on the stage with modest success, she won instant fame with her first novel. Tree sold 6,000,000 copies, was made into a movie and a Broadway musical. Her three later novels, though bestsellers, were mere saplings in comparison. "I wish," she once mused, "I'd written my books in reverse...
...comedian, any more than Jack Benny is just a Jewish comedian. His characters and his situations are black, but his humor is universal. He has the talent to make blacks laugh without anger and whites laugh without guilt. "Flip touches more comic bases than anyone else," says Actor and Playwright Ossie Davis (Purlie Victorious). "He retains some of the tradition of the clown as against the comic. A comic is a personality who deals with verbal delivery and usually with bland topics like mothers-in-law and taxes. A clown is a character complete unto himself. Flip Wilson can create...
Schrag's monolithic reading runs its natural course to self-parody. But the sad thing is that in overestimating the WASP-both as hero and as villain -he underestimates everybody else. One would never guess that the most talented playwright in American history was a black Irishman named Eugene O'Neill, or that the wisest philosopher was a half-Spaniard, George Santayana. One would never suspect that America's only native art, jazz, was the invention of Americans who were neither Anglo-Saxon nor white...
However, the play clearly points up the three minimal demands that we must begin making of the avant-garde playwright. Does he have something new to tell us? Is his theatricality so exciting as to justify telling us nothing? Does he extend the forms of drama? If all the answers are no, as in Handke's case, he should be accorded no more attention than a purveyor of fake antiques. In reality, such a playwright is insulting the audience-what the Germans call Publikumsbeschimpfung. That was the title of an earlier Handke play in which four actors simply revile...