Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...woman, and she lied about it?to preserve her place in suburban London society and to keep the young squib whom she loved. Such conduct was reprehensible, and the neighbors, including the ineffective young swain, felt obligated to expel her. Chastity went without saying in the '90's, until Playwright Henry Arthur Jones said several things about it defending Mrs. Dane. Reviews of the play were of two opinions. Older theatregoers remembered the sex dialectics of their youth. Young ones were mystified by a creed of elaborate duplicity. The play was an ambiguous first choice by the new company...
...Significance. The play was strange, not only by reason of its length. Playwright O'Neill re-introduced the aside, mainstay of earlier dramatists, long discarded by scornful realists. His people's words and actions he completed with their thoughts. Every few moments the action stopped completely while an immobile performer spoke what was rattling through his mind. The spoken word was often a direct denial of its companion thought. Suspicion, mastered grief, cynicism, inferiority?the raw matter of truth?were permitted and expressed. The author tried devotedly to give his hearers a third theatrical dimension. The strange convention, difficult...
Beyond and above all these disturbances rose the conviction of many an acute observer that a great play had been delivered to the world. Writhing and not always sharply articulate in the labor of his composition, Playwright O'Neill has done no tidy job. Raw life does not arrive that way. Uncompromising, tiny and horribly large, mystic and yet inestimably exact, Strange Interlude sweats blood...
...Playwright. Eugene Gladstone O'Neill is the son of actor James O'Neill, famed across the U. S. in earlier days as Monte Cristo. With his trouping father and a devoted mother, not an actress, he spent staccato years in larger cities where James O'Neill was acting. After that, school days under Catholic and later conventional preparatory schoolmasters. Then a year at Princeton, whence he was fired for a "prank." Then an inordinate mixture of oddities. He worked in a mail order firm in Manhattan; went gold prospecting to Honduras; shipped as a common sailor to South American ports...
...potentialities. His photography is always dextrous, at times brilliantly effective. Director Griffith was accustomed to lie under a dining room table, in La Grange, Ky., listening to the stories which his father, a Colonel, would read aloud by the light of a lone, economical candle. Later be became reporter, playwright, saw a movie in a nickel theatre. His first connection with the cinema was that of an actor; he used later to direct Mary Pickford or Mack Sennett, making a picture a day. According to tradition, it was D. W. Griffith who suggested that cinemas be lengthened to two reels...