Word: playwrightes
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...together with the Actors Studio and Method acting. What Hair, Oh! Calcutta! and The Company imply and anticipate is a mentality of paganism, quite possibly the first such mentality ever to shape the course of the American theater. As yet, this mentality lacks a commanding playwright or an acting discipline, but it seems distinctly likely that these are lurking in the wings...
Pirandello used to ponder the curious fate of the great playwright who, being mortal, changed and died, but whose characters were immutable and immortal. Witnessing great drama means spending an evening with these immortals. The Three Sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, who yearn in vain to go to Moscow, have a place in the minds and hearts of people who have never even seen the Chekhov play...
...provincial town, a woman of fire, intelligence, gravity and spirit, married to a bureaucratic paper clip of a man who bores her to headaches rather than tears. Impelled to passion with a man who must leave her, she conveys a heartrending gallantry. Perhaps the saddest fate of a great playwright is not to live to see performances like this...
WRITING about one of the more blatantly commercial comedies of the current Broadway season. Walter Kerr applauded the playwright for concocting a work whose only purpose in the world seemed to be to keep the theatregoer from killing himself in the lobby during intermission. Kerr has a good point, because even if curbing suicidal ten-dencies in the audience shouldn't be the only purpose of commercial theatre, it must be its basic purpose. For if commercial theatre doesn't do at least that-doesn't at least make us temporarily forget our neuroses-it has no reason to exist...
...labels such as the Pilgrim, the Fool, the Saint. In Buchwald's comic allegory, the characters are similarly walking labels: the Hawk (a syndicated Washington columnist), the Ambassador, the Pentagon Man, the C.I.A. Man, the A.I.D. Man, the Local Prince. Stereotypes do contain truths, and they serve a playwright well, but only 50% of the way. The other 50% comes from a playwright's individuation of his characters so that they surprise, confound, delight and involve the audience. That is the 50% that Art Buchwald cannot yet supply in Sheep on the Runway...