Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIED. SIDNEY KINGSLEY, 88, playwright; in Oakland, New Jersey. Kingsley's stage works were known for their flinty realism and social crusading. Dead End decried the slums of New York, inspiring New Deal public-housing legislation (forever tagging the young actors who appeared in the film version as "The Dead End Kids"). The 1933 Pulitzer-prizewinning Men in White proselytized for abortion rights-and created much of the narrative vocabulary for all medical melodramas that followed. Kingsley's 1949 blend of Freud and fisticuffs, Detective Story, had a similar impact on the now ubiquitous, then trailblazing cops-and-crooks...
David J. Eilenberg '97, a resident of Dunster House, received the Phyllis Anderson Prize for his one-act play, Pumpkin. The prize, which is given by the College every other year to a student playwright, is accompanied by a $500 cash award...
...play's greatest strength is playwright John Guare's absolutely precise understanding of the Kittredges' life and milieu. They are sophistcated, ironic, baffled by their children, and a bit greedy, and their rapid-fire dialogue is the play's only unalloyed pleasure. Elsewhere, when Guare burlesques surly adolescents or waxes philosophical about the value of deep human connections, the play loses its sure touch; but when the Kittredges are on stage, especially in the first scene, they are delightful to hear...
More than any other Russian playwright, Chekhov is perceived in America as relevant to our age. This may be owing to his trafficking in gloom (any impulse toward optimism being, of course, evidence of callowness). But even his darkest interludes are subtle and variegated. There's a vivid moment in one of his stories when an awestruck boy beholds a flash of lightning: "someone seemed to strike a match in the sky." Something lovely is always dancing beyond Chekhov's horizon, toward which his characters gaze with palpable yearning...
Rosanna Y. Alfaro '60, a playwright and author, and Daryl N. Chinn, a poet-teacher-editor, also performed their writings...