Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...write for Cinemogul Samuel Goldwyn at $260,000 annually, Hollywood's highest writing stipend. Soon thereafter he went on leave to try compacting two more ideas into three acts each. In the tortured and tortuous mental life of his hero Sterns in To Quito and Back, friends of Playwright Hecht thought they saw more than a trace of autobiography...
...Playwright Crothers pays most of her attention to Susan, a skittish matron who has barged in on drawing-room Buchmanism abroad, and has returned to bring this grand new message of the inspirational values of open confession straight from the horse mouth of one Lady Wiggam to her own circle of friends. In one week end of sustained busybodying, Susan manages, by artful innuendo and a few lucky potshots, to disrupt the placidly illicit love life of her hostess, turn a well adjusted May-December marriage into a triangular mess...
...Star-Wagon (by Maxwell Anderson; Guthrie McClintic, producer). In the preface to his verse tragedy Winterset, Playwright Anderson announced his abiding belief in poetry for the stage, but prophesied that it would triumph only when "an age of reason will be followed by an age of faith in things unseen." The Star-Wagon makes at least as much claim: upon ''things unseen" as the ghostly Dutchmen for last season's High Tor, but observers, who found his last four plays marred by turgid dialog and prose which often bore only the typographical mask of verse, welcomed Playwright...
First serious offering of the season, the play must be bracketed with Anderson's second best oblations. The Star-Wagon lacks Playwright Anderson's customary magnitude, is bathed in a questionable, tepid philosophy, bumps to a bromidic finale. Reminiscent of sundry other tinkerings with the past (Berkeley Square, Dear Brutus, Merrily We Roll Along, If, One Sunday Afternoon, et al.), it has slight claim to originality...
...Playwright Anderson's 20th play is pleasantly ingenious, its principal characterizations warmly human, its early 20th Century episodes (reminiscent of Ah, Wilderness, Eugene O'Neill's better realized, if less ambitious, comedy) highly entertaining. Director McClintic's staging of an automobile ride, choir rehearsal and picnic in the year 1902 makes the second act a riot of Americana. Burgess Meredith proves himself the most accomplished of young U. S. actors, neatly running the gamut of middle age and youth, inspired duffer and embittered worldling. As the inventor's crony, Russell Collins (The Group Theatre...