Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...show business, who has learned every trick of the trade and invented many a new one. It proclaims an amazing foresight in always taking the pulse of Broadway as the clue to its heart, a habit of always writing fashionable plays and never revolutionary ones. It proclaims a playwright who has made sport of everything while never giving offense to anybody. It proclaims a really great practical theatre mind, with no philosophy except that the theatre is entertainment, and that good entertainment pays...
Margin for Error (by Clare Boothe; produced by Richard Aldrich & Richard Myers) breaks the jinx on anti-Nazi plays (five in a row flopped last season) by breaking the mold. Playwright Boothe makes everything Nazi-totsy by shifting her scene to the U. S., turning her tale into a lively mystery melodrama, and peppering it with wisecracks like those in The Women and Kiss the Boys Goodbye...
...Time of Your Life (by William Saroyan; produced by the Theatre Guild Inc. in association with Eddie Dowling). Last season Short-Story Writer William Saroyan made his bow as a playwright with a long, whimsical one-acter, My Heart's in the Highlands, drew praise from many critics. Last week, with his first full-length play, Saroyan had most of the critics throwing their hats in the air. They were willing to forgive The Time of Your Life its lack of form and dearth of plot because of its "poignant beauty," "high quality of imagination," "ever-warming tenderness...
Last week Director Michael Chekhov, nephew of famed Playwright Anton Chekhov, offered a dramatization of Dostoevsky's The Possessed. Probably the worst of all attempts to put Dostoevsky on the stage, it reduced the vast forest of his imagination to dead, sapless stumps. One grotesque, blighted scene followed another. The hero Stavrogin-one of the most astounding characters in fiction-became any confused young intellectual seeking an answer to life. The answer itself was pared down to a kind of Dos-toevsky-for-Tots...
...mercy of a muddled playwright and an arty director, a not untalented cast was doomed from the start. Apparently assuming that twisted bodies mean twisted souls, they writhed like the Laocoon group. A revolutionary solemnly announced that only a small part of the human race have their heads cut off. The villain twitched about the stage like Mephistopheles with a tic. The audience half expected Fannie Brice to burst in, roll her eyes, and mutter as she did of yore: "It is always c-o-old in Roosia...