Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...brought his bile into the theater, but left his craft at the stage door. Aint is a series of street sketches featuring pimps, whores, hustlers, drug addicts, corrupt cops, Panthers and jailbirds?all the characters who would be promptly denounced as racist stereotypes if a white playwright dared to suggest their existence. Inevitably, there are quite a few moments of truth, a quite poignant one when a country boy (Ralph Wilcox) finds out that his sister (Barbara Alston) who fled to the city has become a prostitute. But the book is torpid, the music is undistinguished and the words...
Black Comedy and The Public Eye--two one-act plays by British playwright Peter Shaffer now claiming digs on the Loeb's mainstage--are, you can't escape it, the products of a weazy old middle-class theater, but the ingeniousness of their author and the ingenuousness of this cast does as much as can be done in the way of stirring up the tired blood. Shaffer's forte, it would seem, is to take up the basic elements of cliche (a triangle of husband, detective and adulterous wife in the case of The Public Eye and a where-were...
THOUGH it lacks something in literary style and narrative flow, the masthead appearing on this page does have an audience; Playwright William Saroyan even had a character in his comedy Love's Old Sweet Song recite it while trying to sell a subscription. Over the years, one name in particular has drawn inquiries, like the letter from a Wisconsin reader who wrote: "I'd sure like to see your cable desk people, including that fine ink-in-the-veins pro, Minnie Magazine. Come on now, this isn't really one of your gang...
Easily the most impressive contribution to the magazine is Chuck Sabel's Play Without Passion, a deft, academic's treatment of the last years in the life of George Buchner, the 19th century German playwright who presaged the emotionally charged theater of the Expressionist school...
...novel. His writings were almost incidental to his career as both medical student and hesitant revolutionary during the student movement of the 1830's. But his plays have survived, and Sabel revives Buchner very much in the context of the personal philosophy that the plays express. In fact, the playwright is cast in a role much like that of the hero in his greatest play, Danton's Death. Sabel's Buchner is, like Buchner's Danton, a passive hero in a play that creates no huge dramatic conflicts. Restrained from political action not by an intellectual's fear of soiling...