Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Arthur Miller had not become a famous playwright, he might have made a top trial lawyer. The rhetoric of the courtroom comes naturally to him. So does the thrust and parry of confrontation. He relishes the niceties of assessing blame, pronouncing guilt and passionately pursuing the quest for justice...
Happy Days is essentially a soliloquy, and thus it confronts us with Beckett's major drawback as a playwright. As the most brilliant disciple of James Joyce, Beckett is the master of the interior monologue. But drama breathes only in dialogue. Hamlet is not babbling to himself in the four great inebriant soliloquies; he is addressing questions to his tormented soul, his troubled mind, his impotent will, and the sultry air resonates. In his one-character play, Krapp's Last Tape, Beckett took some notice of this problem. Between his senile musings and avid munching on a banana...
...least one honorary usually goes to a literary figure, and Lillian Hellman, the playwright and novelist, seems like a top contender, while Susan Sontag, literary critic and aesthete, may also place...
...gave a lift to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by pushing for a jolly new opening number, Comedy Tonight. In some cases, the job is simple reorganization. After the current Broadway revival of Whoopee!, based on the 1928 musical, was slammed in St. Louis, Playwright Jonathan Reynolds (Yankees 3 Boston 0 Top of the Seventh) received an S O S. "In the opening scene, for instance, the main character, Henry Williams, was lost in the crowd, so I gave him more lines," says Reynolds. "I mainly reorganized the play so that the audience would know...
...girl walking down the street," says Burrows. "He doesn't point to her and say, 'You should have seen her before I worked on her.'" If a show is a smash, the original team generally gets the credit, not the doctor. So why does a successful playwright or director answer those frantic calls late at night? "You've got to make a house call," says Gelbart, who, like many play doctors, often slips medical touches into his conversation. He adds, "Any Christ complex you have rises immediately to the top." Power may in fact...