Word: playwrightes
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...such a difficult play is a vast credit to the Long Wharf Theater and its intrepid artistic director Arvin Brown. To marshal an American cast and make it seem British to the marrow is an equal triumph for Director Barry Davis and his admirable players. They have honored a playwright who is an impressive successor to Osborne and Pinter. Only rarely does one encounter a deep, possibly a noble soul who regards the eclipse of his civilization and his folk as direr than his own death...
...play's delight lies in the parodies, its unavoidable weakness in the occasional dips into ho-hum solemnity. Playwright George Herman's academician alter-ego elbows aside the comic dramatist, forcing a meaning which the humorist could carry less intrusively. Herman's over-seriousness trips us the cast as well. The two straight scenes suffer from awkward blocking and sags in tempo while the comic sections skip around similar problems. What's worse, the dialogue smothers itself under a dead weight of philosophizing. Fortunately, Herman's didactic compulsion interfere only infrequently, and the comedy is allowed to bounce ahead...
...women students of the Harvard Divinity School who object to the male-orientation of religion and the church, with God universally regarded as a male, might be interested to know that Eugene O'Neill anticipated them in Strange Interlude more than forty years ago. The eminent playwright, however, apparently thought that women themselves were responsible in part for the establishment of a masculine Godhead. In Strange Interlude the dramatist has his heroine say, when her father dies and she can find no comfort in prayer...
...wholly bad or good / Who live our lives under Milk Wood, / And Thou, I know, wilt be the first / To see our best side not our worst," prays the Reverend Jenkins (Henry Goodhue) at his evening devotions. Although it is not always the role of the playwright to play God, Dylan Thomas heeded this prayer in good stead, and although it is even less the right of an audience, Chris Conte induces...
When an army retreats, some will say that it is regrouping in an impregnable position. When the stock market plummets, some will say that it is testing a support level. When a playwright falls flat on his face, some will say that he is exploring a new frontier of drama. An agile use of the vocabulary of retrieval frequently snatches illusory success from palpable failure...