Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...architectural dictum "Less is more" can be applied to plays as well as buildings. A simple structure can be grander than an ornate one, and a few words from a great playwright can say more than volumes from a second-rater. No one has matched principle and practice as closely as Samuel Beckett. Some of his plays, indeed, are so spare that they can scarcely be said to exist: one new work is only 35 seconds long and dispenses with actors altogether, making use only of lights, sets and sounds...
...bolt of lightning. In his worst, he seems merely to be making bleak jokes, the humor of which is lost on everyone but himself. These three plays, expertly directed by Beckett's chief interpreter, Alan Schneider, at the Manhattan Theater Club, show both sides of the playwright. Play ranks just below the best; That Time and Footfalls settle not far from the bottom...
...recent years, the preproduction interview with a Broadway playwright has taken the place of the Shavian preface. Unlike the Shavian preface, it is rarely witty and seldom illuminating. Customarily, it sounds like last-minute plea bargaining from a man who feels that his pressagent has been negligent in plugging the upcoming show...
...Playwright Tally's approach is chronological and documentary, but he never gets icebound by his research. A back cloth of ghostly white covers the entire rear wall, and the floor has a bleak, blinding pallor. The sled carrying supplies and scientific instruments is a gray oblong mass to be pushed and pulled by the men like a cursed rock of Sisyphus...
DEATH REVEALED. Shane O'Neill, 57, son of Playwright Eugene O'Neill and brother of Oona O'Neill Chaplin, who like his sister was disinherited-she because of her marriage to Charlie Chaplin, a man more than twice her age, he because of what his father described as the "purposelessness" of his life, which included bouts with alcoholism and two narcotics arrests; in a leap from a fourth-floor window on June 22; in Brooklyn...