Word: playwrightes
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...HAVE nothing against the word "fuck" per se. But when a playwright uses it as often as I blink my eyes, I expect him to provide some of the excitement this word suggests. In Sligar and Son, author Andy Hoye fires away with enough expletives for five LeRoi Jones one-acters, yet the four-letter word that most aptly describes his play is "dull...
Perhaps Sligar and Son wouldn't seem so bad, if it didn't try to pass itself off as a slice of ghetto life, circa 1967. But this is what it does, from the language to Debbie Waroff's fine naturalistic set. Not for a moment does the playwright convince us that he knows what he is talking about. (Hardly does the play begin when he shows us a hippie reading that revolutionary tract Black Like Me.) The playwright who wanted so much to give his work the sound of Stokely Carmichael gave us the sound of a foul-mouthed...
...want my audience to feel rather than think," said Playwright Megan Terry about her Viet Rock, which ran for 62 Manhattan performances in 1966. Obviously, she has not changed her mind. The People vs. Ranchman, which opened off-Broadway last week, is equally devoid of intellectual content. Paradoxically, though, it is likely to leave a mature playgoer doing more thinking than feeling...
There is also a deadly spectator who helps kill drama. He is the theatergoer whose only conception of good theater is that it be nice, decent, reassuring and uplifting, but never marrow-chilling or soul-devouring. Playwrights themselves propagate dead plays, since most of them cannot fulfill the single most demanding requisite of vital drama: "A playwright is required by the very nature of drama to enter into the spirit of opposing characters. He is not a judge; he is a creator. The job of shifting oneself totally from one character to another-a principle on which all of Shakespeare...
...proclaimed roughness, Brecht is a particular idol of Brook's because of his contention that an audience should wake up and think, and that drama should be an instrument of social change. Brook accepts too uncritically the notion that Brecht wanted an audience to think for itself: no playwright was a more sedulous brainwasher. Despite his fierce ideological bias, however, there is no convincing proof that Brecht-or any other playwright-ever altered the course of a society. Reflecting the nature of a society is another question; all good drama does that...