Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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NOTHING MAKES AN OPERA MORE CLASsical than a mythological subject, and nothing makes it more modern than psychology. Playwright Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss) and composer Gerald Busby fuse the two in ORPHEUS IN LOVE, an off- Broadway retelling of the Orpheus legend -- mingling hints of Oedipus -- in which the characters are music teachers or pupils and hell is interwoven with high school. The sound, too, (by a string quartet, piano and two bassoons) - hovers between melodic-traditional and staccato-modern. Kirsten Sanderson's witty staging deftly evokes dreams -- their fleeting lyricism, transposed logic, sexual ambiguity and poignant blend...
...mistakes for a government investigator. The setting and some of the plot, however, came from an episode Sullivan heard about when serving on a National Endowment for the Arts theater panel: a beleaguered troupe, desperate to sustain its grant, offered to bribe an agency inspector who was also a playwright by pledging to produce his plays...
...unshowy performance as the celebrity writer Trigorin that subtly conveys the character's lonely, inward-looking obsession with his craft. As the actress Arkadina, Tyne Daly stresses monstrous self-absorption. Not for Daly the customary dotty unawareness of how she puts down her son, a would-be avant- garde playwright; each belittling gesture is calculated cruelty. As the son, Ethan Hawke solves the play's pivotal problem, foreshadowing the youth's instability and making clear why he and not his at-wit's-end beloved, Nina, commits suicide...
...imagery sums up the foundation-toppling ideology of Angels in America, which last week won the Evening Standard award as London's best play while an updated and expanded version debuted in Los Angeles, it cannot begin to suggest the playwright's wacky tactics -- the derisive humor, uninhibited fantasy and freehand jumbling of the journalistic and the supernatural that distinguish this raging farce from lesser, if tidier, AIDS plays. Kushner takes a topic for a TV mini-series and warps it into weirdly satisfying poetry...
...Huntington Theatre's production of Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece Long day's Journey Into Night is a perfect example of why America's greatest playwright has fallen into disrepute among critics in the past several years...