Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Poland has journalist Tadeusz Mazowiecki as Prime Minister. Czechoslovakia has playwright Vaclav Havel as President. Last week Hungary also put a writer at the helm. The parliament elected Arpad Goencz, an English translator and former dissident who spent six years in jail after the 1956 revolution, as the country's new interim and largely ceremonial President...
...Brest-Litovsk was suppressed for more than two decades. When it finally debuted in 1987, however, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev attended the premiere; afterward he endorsed the play and embraced its leading actor, his friend Mikhail Ulyanov. One version has Gorbachev saying, "That is me. That is me." Playwright Mikhail Shatrov, 58, says that the actual words were more restrained but that Gorbachev openly drew parallels between Lenin's reluctant peace with imperial Germany and his own reform and retrenchment. Thus the staging of Shatrov's text became a political as well as an artistic event, a landmark of changing...
...answering this question, the play takes off in all sorts of comic directions. There are phone calls to the playwright himself incorporating a tape recorded voice that sounds pretty much like Woody Allen, and an appearance by Blanche DuBois, followed by Groucho Marx and a messenger from Western Union. All these arbitrary appearances serve to make the play a bizarre and entertaining satire of drama in general...
Stoppard employs an almost cinematic technique of cutting between actual scenes from Hamlet and his own invention. His manner is witty without being jarring, and the cast of this production are careful that the transitions are as natural and unnatural as the playwright intended...
During the deliberations that led to August Wilson's being awarded a second Pulitzer Prize for drama last week, members of the Pulitzer board likened him to the playwright generally regarded as America's greatest: Eugene O'Neill. If that comparison seems overly generous -- Wilson has not yet produced a masterpiece to rank with Long Day's Journey into Night, nor does his body of work yet rival the four-decade outpouring that won O'Neill the Pulitzer four times and the Nobel Prize to boot -- the praise may merely be premature. In just over five years, since his first...