Word: playwrighting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Contempt is hardly Godard's best or most evocative work, but it exposes his feelings for the seductive lie of movies: that "cinema replaces our gaze with a world in harmony with our desires" (the same line is quoted in For Ever Mozart). A French playwright (Michel Piccoli) is hired for a rewrite job by an American producer (Jack Palance) who has eyes for the writer's sexy wife (Brigitte Bardot). With its polyglot cast and mixed-doubles leering, Contempt gets the Babel and Babylon of filmmaking down perfectly...
These days, it seems better to refuse than to receive. LARRY KRAMER, bellicose playwright and activist, wanted to bequeath several million dollars to Yale for a tenured chair in gay and lesbian studies. Yale, which doesn't like to take instruction from benefactors, said "it was inappropriate to endow in perpetuity a professorship in an academic area yet to be well established or defined," and wanted to put his money elsewhere. Kramer opted out. "It has been a very distasteful experience," says the playwright. Meanwhile in St. Paul, Minn., artist LEROY NEIMAN withdrew an offer to donate $4.5 million worth...
...opening lines of Henry V have a seductive charm. Using the humble voice of the narrator, the playwright cajoles the audience to suspend disbelief. It's a bit much to ask, he admits, but might we transform "this unworthy scaffold" of the stage into the "vasty fields of France? or may we cram/Within this wooden O the very casques/That did affright the air at Agincourt?" For nearly four centuries, audiences have readily joined in this theatrical pretense. After all, who can refuse Shakespeare a favor...
...Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde--a surprise success way-off-Broadway that has just moved to larger quarters--playwright and director Moises Kaufman has dramatized that fall with the sort of rapier stylization that Wilde himself would have admired. Nine actors facing the audience in two rows--a kind of oratorio at the Old Bailey--re-enact the legal proceedings and comment on them at the same time, using excerpts from newspaper accounts, biographical works and the memoirs of Wilde and others. It's a dazzling coup de theatre, at once compelling history and chilling human drama...
Others to be honored include epidemiologist William H. Foege (Doctor of Science); Class Day speaker and music producer Quincy D. Jones Jr. (Doctor of Music); playwright Arthur Miller (Doctor of Letters); Princeton geophysicist W. Jason Morgan (Doctor of Science); and economist Janet L. Norwood (Doctor of Laws...