Word: playwrighting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Playwright George C. Wolfe, best known for his unsparing satire in The Colored Museum, plainly has grander ambitions in mind for Jelly's Last Jam, a biography of composer and performer Jelly Roll Morton. The show is as much a review of Morton's racial politics and ethnic fealty as of his musical contribution as the asserted "inventor of jazz." The central plot point is that Morton was of mixed-race Creole ancestry and prided himself on his relative whiteness, even while immersing himself in, and transforming, black music. The show's theme is that neither he nor any black...
Robert J. Bouffier, playing John Wisehammer, a convict fascinated by the power of words, also deserves attention. He frequently quotes from Johnson's Dictionary: "abject: a man without hope" and has secret hopes of becoming a playwright. In fact, Wertenbaker makes him the voice for the words which name this play: "True patriots we, for be it understood/We left our country for our country's good." (Incidentally, these lines are generally attributed to George Barrington, but nevermind...
Before August Wilson was a playwright, he was a poet. Although he came to the theater out of the black anger and community activism of the '60s, he was always more interested in language than in agenda, more sensitive to metaphors than to manifestos. At his lyrical best, which he certainly is in the remarkable play that reached Broadway last week after two years of regional development, Wilson can embed subtle and complex political commentary within the conversational riffs of fully realized characters. He can also end an almost actionless slice of life with an abrupt burst of violence, then...
...Tony for Nicholas Nickleby, as a British aristocrat turned Southern California hustler; TV stars Nancy Marchand of Lou Grant, double-cast as his London mother and his Los Angeles boss, and Jean Smart of Designing Women, as both of his abused wives. What a pity that promising playwright Jon Robin Baitz, 30, who in THE END OF THE DAY parallels Old World and New World corruption from charity medical wards to drug dealing to corporate raiding, can't stitch together a coherent narrative. His common but fatal mistakes: portraying all capitalists as repugnantly the same without making any of them...
...biggest surprise came when the award for drama was announced: The Kentucky Cycle, a six-hour historical saga by the relatively unknown playwright Robert Schenkkan -- and the first play to win a Pulitzer without ever having been produced in New York City. His epic, which spans 200 years of American history as experienced by three eastern Kentucky families, premiered in Seattle last June and completed a six-week run in Los Angeles last month...