Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DIED. Sir Terence Rattigan, 66, prolific British playwright (The Winslow Boy, Separate Tables); of cancer; in Hamilton, Bermuda. After Rattigan left Oxford to write plays, his father supported him during a trial period. Just as it ended, his comedy French Without Tears became a hit and ran for 1,039 performances in London. Rattigan's forte was, as he once said, "the play that unashamedly says nothing-except possibly that human beings are strange creatures, and worth putting on the stage, where they can be laughed at or cried over, as our pleasure takes...
...this venomously plotted vengeance? Both men are onetime promising actors who have had to settle for doing television commercials and voiceovers. As Richard puts it, with his wife dead there will be "nobody to remind me of my potential." Playwright Tesich partially redeems this shaky premise by reminding us that failure is not a private affair in the U.S. It is a public humiliation. By shutting their wives' eyes, the two men hope to shut the world's eyes...
Tommy Kramer, the playwright, has a good grasp of some of the weaknesses in the show. "It's a difficult play that's almost a non-play--episodes, a series of skits," Kramer says. Kramer is disappointed with the opening scene and rightly criticizes it: "It's eight stand-up comics at the beginning, and the dialogue could have been a lot snappier." In the opening scene, the jokes die; the players appear lifeless, like actors reading cue cards. But the dialogue quickly snaps up, the performers relax with their roles, and work with each other until the humor comes...
...expected that when a novelist-playwright like Beckett, whose subject matter deals with lack of communication and absurdity, turns to poetry, his already intense style will seem exaggerated. We are not surprised when we find that Beckett has written only a handful of poems because we know the intensity of feeling each must contain when only one, sometimes two, are produced in a year. In the same way we should not be surprised by Beckett's somewhat exaggerated poetic style...
...Failing itself, well, it is hard to judge a first effort without being overly critical. Gallo's play bears the marks of a talented young playwright, yet at the same time it bears the scars that usually mar a first work, albeit in a somewhat unusual fashion. The production itself has some very strong points, but also some weak acting, an annoyingly static plot, and seemingly uninspired direction, all of which leave it somewhat lifeless...