Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Roof, with its layers of grandiloquent Southern mendacity, might serve as an emblem for the life of its creator. The playwright with the arresting name of Tennessee was born plain Thomas; Williams wreathed himself in beguiling inventions and evasions. Some of these were the by-product of a well-meaning gentility, as in his and his family's attempts to veil from the world the tragedy of his sister Rose, whose schizophrenia ended catastrophically in a lobotomy. Some were solitary acts of cool calculation, as when he lopped three years off his age to render himself eligible for a young...
...what will be a two-volume portrait. It tracks Williams from 1911--when he was born, in St. Louis, Missouri, to an indrawn, alcoholic father who worked most of his life for a shoe company and an outgoing, garrulous mother of frustrated social ambitions--until 1945, when the playwright achieved his first great success with The Glass Menagerie...
Within his plays, Williams' pursuit of the poetic extends beyond the dialogue. Is there another American playwright whose stage directions are so revealing, so entertaining, so rich? Suddenly Last Summer calls for a garden that is "more like a tropical jungle, or forest, in the prehistoric age of giant fern-forests when living creatures had flippers turning to limbs and scales to skin." The Glass Menagerie asks for light "such as El Greco's, where the figures are radiant in atmosphere that is relatively dusky." If demands like these normally would appear affected or ostentatious, Williams makes them look like...
Christopher Durang '71 is a playwright of extremes. His plays and musicals combine sophisticated literary allusion and bawdy sexual humor. He parodizes and satirizes such revered institutions as religion, the family, and the literary canon. According to Durang, the only rule in writing is "whatever you write about, you must have a strong reaction to it." Ironically, the one institution Durang seems to have no strong opinion about is his alma mater--Harvard...
Christopher Hampton, the playwright who wrote and directed Carrington, obviously believes it was the former. Yet his account of the relationship between the half-forgotten painter and the homosexual who turned biography into a modernist art form is distant and gingerly, respectful and respectable. Reason tells us that there must have been something more needy and smothering in her nature, something more grasping and careless in his, than Hampton shows us. After all, Dora did marry a handsome youth not because she was smitten with him but because Lytton was. Yet their menage a trois is presented blandly...