Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When he left New York last January to establish himself in Hollywood, Neil Simon, Broadway's best comic playwright, seemed destined to dissolve into orange juice. The master of the sharp New York-Jewish one-liner, the one man who has been able to keep Broadway alive and kicky for 15 years -with Sunshine Boys, Plaza Suite, The Odd Couple and The Prisoner of Second Avenue-could not possibly survive in all that gossamer. He was too deep into Broadway to travel well. His brains would scramble in the sun. The sands of Malibu would jam his typewriter...
...tension of the evening stems from two separate strands of emotion. On the one hand, these monologues are portraits in embittered pain, the basic proposition being, "He done her wrong." On the other hand, they demonstrate the concentric power of love in a woman's life. If Playwright Shange had chosen an epigraph for her play, the one most suited to it is the one that in her militantly feminist way she would not have chosen: By ron's "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; 'tis woman's whole...
When she was subpoenaed in 1952 to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Playwright Lillian Hellman made a firm decision. She would tell committee members whatever they wished to hear about her own political views and activities, but she would not discuss the real or imagined subversions of anyone else. In a letter to HUAC Chairman John S. Wood 1 she declared: "I am not willing, now or in the future, to bring bad trouble to people who, in my past association with them, were completely innocent of any talk or any action that was disloyal...
Panizza's devil seems to be the only one who grasps this fact clearly, and it informs his dissatisfaction and frustration with the scheme of being and not being. He sees the heavenly world the way the playwright does--as a fraud. He's an intellectual type, consigned for his shrewdness to menial tasks and thwarted revolutions. He's sort of sympathetic in his weakness; surely he would be happier with his head in the clouds. Instead, he's worse off than we are, with his feet firmly planted under the ground. It might be going...
Director Mike Nichols' work is clean, powerful and electric, and he has elicited from Dorian Harewood a shattering performance that is equally intense in its falsely gibing nonchalance and in its true sorrow. But what about Playwright Rabe and his obsession with the same terrain and subject? It is worth noting that none of his "war" plays take place in the combat zone. Pavlo Hummel probed the rigors of boot camp, Sticks and Bones exposed the unhealing scar tissue of a returned Viet Nam veteran, and now Streamers exhausts itself in an intermediate no man's land where...