Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MARTIN RITT hasn't transformed the dross of The Great White Hope into a good film, at least his jumbling of theatrical convention and film cliche makes it fairly easy to watch. Despite playwright Howard Sackler's screenplay, and his play's prime standing as a Kultcha classic, Ritt hasn't stooped to the traditional homage Hollywood usually pays to Broadway hit-dom. The Great White Hope is severely divided, but many of the tensions the black actors manage to convey are true. At certain points-particularly when the splendid Moses Gunn, as an anachronistic black nationalist street preacher, accosts...
Given the historical context, it may seem nigh impossible to overstate the repressive prejudices of Johnson's time. However, that is precisely what Sackler has done. Most of Johnson's personality has been removed from the playwright's Jack Jefferson, making him more defenseless and unblemished than Johnson's staunchest supporters ever claimed. Sackler's character has none of Johnson's sensual excesses (and only one all-suffering white wife, drearily enacted by Jane Alexander). The ironic sense of his own destiny which allowed Johnson to cheat and compromise his way to personal security is switched to Jefferson's stereotyped...
...streets of French provincial towns and in a small Parisian nightclub. Enthusiastic audiences have been unaware how Victoria comes by her wistful clowning; she is the 19-year-old daughter of Charlie Chaplin and his wife, Oona-who is herself the daughter of America's greatest playwright, Eugene O'Neill. The circus she and Actor Jean-Baptiste Thierree, 33, have worked up "is not really for children," he says. "It is partly political, partly philosophical. The important thing is to make people laugh...
...Claire Lannes (Mildred Dunnock). The husband is a dull, evasive clod of a businessman, and the first act is enough of an ordeal to put a playgoer's patience in doubt. The second act redeems all. As certain healers are adept at touching the body to ease pain. Playwright Duras is skilled at touching a woman's psyche to expose pain. And love, and loathing-the heart's peopled wound. And a claustrophobically confined intelligence. A Place Without Doors really lies in the land of Hedda Gabler...
Died. Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, 82, widow of the playwright, a minor actress but great beauty of the '20s; in Westwood, NJ. "The first time I met O'Neill," she once recalled, "I thought him the rudest man I'd ever seen. And he had no use for me." They both soon thought differently, and after a tempestuous courtship, were married in 1929. She brought a semblance of stability to his life, putting his affairs in order, typing his manuscripts and looking after his poor health. He responded with bursts of creative energy, notably Mourning Becomes...