Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...type," have adopted his black beret. Arab guerrillas sometimes name combat operations in his honor. Posters of Che adorn dorm walls from Berkeley to Berlin, and his books have become basic-training manuals for the New Left. Writers from Graham Greene to Susan Sontag have extolled him. West German Playwright Peter Weiss (Marat/ Sade) has even compared him to "a Christ taken down from the Cross...
Even so, the process of myth-building is continuing. At present, Che appears each evening in a new play. The Guerrillas, by German Playwright Rolf Hochhuth, whose earlier play, The Deputy, pilloried Pope Pius XII for his failure to denounce the Nazi extermination of Jews. In The Guerrillas, now playing in four German cities, a young New York Senator who is also leader of a Che-style U.S. underground movement pleads with Guevara to abandon his Bolivian battle. Che refuses. "My death here-in a calculated sense-is the only possible victory," he says. "I must leave a sign...
With due and high regard for John Donne, every man is an island. We make beachheads on these islands, advance with deceptive ease for a few hundred yards, and then run into an impenetrable rain forest. No modern playwright has been more acutely conscious of the resistant density of the human personality than Harold Pinter...
...interpret his plays, a good guide is a necessity. He exists in Martin Esslin (The Peopled Wound; Doubleday; $5.95). Author of The Theatre of the Absurd and Brecht: The Man and His Work, Esslin is a genial host of a critic. He shares an avant-garde playwright with his readers in the same enthusiastic way that he might recommend an excellent little restaurant slightly off the tourist track. The Peopled Wound is valuable not because it makes some intuitive new leap of insight but because it gathers in one convenient place most of what has been said and thought about...
...immediate reaction of many playgoers was that no wife and mother would behave that way. But, as Esslin keeps saying, Pinter is an existential playwright. His brief basic creed holds that human nature is not fixed and ordained, either by divine law or some ingrained edict governing the behavior of the species. Man instead defines himself in moment-to-moment acts that may be quite contradictory. This accounts for the breath-stopping power of the totally unexpected in a Pinter play...