Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Playwright August Wilson -- who wrote The Piano Lesson and Fences -- begins his new play with a scene in which a group of friends are mourning the death of Floyd Barton, a blues guitarist and singer whose career was about to take off when he died. The rest of the play, about Barton's rocky life, is "enormously promising and filled with colorful sketches of dialogue and very appealing characters" says TIME critic Bill Tynan. As the end of the play approaches, however, both the "plotting and the ideas get muddy, so it isn't as moving as it should...
...what he has described as a coda to his seven-hour Pulitzer-prizewinning epic Angels in America, playwright Tony Kushner has written a little one-act vaudeville called Slavs!, fuzzily subtitled Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness. In 80 wordy minutes, Kushner scampers through seven years in the collapse of Russian communism (the second half of Angels, remember, was called Perestroika) and bounces from the Kremlin to a fantastic archive housing the bottled brains of dead party leaders to a Siberia-like heaven. His final line asks, as Lenin did, "What is to be done?" Audiences...
...John Osborne wrote, "is the one unforgettable feast in my calendar." It was the birthday of the playwright's beloved father Thomas, whose early, lonely death would scar young John for life. On May 8, 1956, in London, Osborne's play Look Back in Anger had its premiere -- a seismic shock that seemed to signal the birth of a new urgency and the death of the reigning theatrical gentility. "When I saw Look Back in Anger," said John Gielgud, a star of the old school, "I thought my number...
This was drama as rant, an explosion of bad manners, a declaration of war against an empire in twilight. The acid tone, at once comic and desperate, sustained Osborne throughout a volatile career as playwright, film writer (Tom Jones) and memoirist (A Better Class of Person). More important, it stoked a ferment in a then sleepy popular culture. Anger's curdling inflections and class animosities were echoed in the plays of Joe Orton and Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a direct descendant), in Dennis Potter's savage TV scripts and in a generation of performers, from...
Even with a mountaineer's ax stuck in his head, Leon Trotsky (Philip Hoffman) can find nine ways to muse on life and death. And even in a 10-minute sketch, playwright David Ives can find a dozen ways to aerobicize the playgoer's brain. Six pieces in one dazzling off-Broadway evening display Ives' verbal gifts and humanist brooding. These are breathless sprints that the heart makes over the high hurdles of language...