Word: playwrighting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Henny Youngman notwithstanding, there is nothing less funny than poorly written satire. Bernard's, an Austrian playwright, attempts in The President to make a political statement about decaying leaders and regimes versus the forces of anarchy and/or revolution through black humor. Unfortunately for Bernard and worse still for the audience, The President has the most boring, inane, meaningless script produced at Harvard this year. The play is simply terrible, and the production isn't much better...
...MIND of the playwright is not unlike that of the master criminal. Before acting, each must construct a well-conceived, meticulous plan, tightly bound together, without any loose ends. In the case of Softly Stealing, the new Kirkland House musical, the mastermind is that of Tom Fuller '74 of Harvard's Gilbert and Sullivan fame, and the plot rocks with enough surprising twists and turns to be worthy of the reputation of Edward Sable, its notorious but good-hearted Victorian robber hero...
...question of whether Stoppard can write a play that relies less on epigrammatical flash and more on substance still remains, however. Stoppard is only 38, still a young playwright, and Travesties must be looked on as an early work of genius. But it is genius, nonetheless; someday we may wonder why and how Stoppard went on, while the rest of us teach, work, play, lie in the cemetary up the hill in Zurich or under glass in the Kremlin...
...play is a sort of junk shop of language, and it too is forlornly eloquent. The speech of Mamet's three characters-the owner of the store and two neighborhood punks who hang out there-is an incrustation of street slang, non sequiturs, malapropisms and compulsive obscenity. The playwright revels a bit too much in this scatology and blasphemy. Delete the most common four-letter Anglo-Saxonism from the script and his drama might last only one hour instead of two. But Mamet has an infallible ear for the cadences of loneliness and fear behind the bluntness...
David Mamet, unlike the grunting, inarticulate characters he puts on the stage in American Buffalo, is as wordy as Webster's. In the course of conversation, the 29-year-old playwright can ornament his speeches with quotes from Tolstoy, Archibald MacLeish, Karl Marx, Voltaire, Jesus or Stanislavsky...