Word: playwrighting
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More than any other Russian playwright, Chekhov is perceived in America as relevant to our age. This may be owing to his trafficking in gloom (any impulse toward optimism being, of course, evidence of callowness). But even his darkest interludes are subtle and variegated. There's a vivid moment in one of his stories when an awestruck boy beholds a flash of lightning: "someone seemed to strike a match in the sky." Something lovely is always dancing beyond Chekhov's horizon, toward which his characters gaze with palpable yearning...
Rosanna Y. Alfaro '60, a playwright and author, and Daryl N. Chinn, a poet-teacher-editor, also performed their writings...
DIED. ROBERT BOLT, 70, playwright and screenwriter; after years of declining health; in southern England. The theme of an individual's struggle for moral equilibrium in the face of world-shattering historical events runs through much of Bolt's work, from his career-making play, 1960's A Man for All Seasons, which he fashioned into an Oscar-winning screenplay for the 1966 movie version, to his scripts for the David Lean epics Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dr. Zhivago (1965)-the latter earning Bolt an Oscar...
DIED. MICHAEL GAZZO, 71, actor, playwright and screenwriter; of complications from a stroke; in Los Angeles. Gazzo's A Hatful of Rain was a mid-'50s stage hit that depicted a drug-addicted Korean War veteran with sympathy and, for its time, compelling realism. The work enjoyed a second life as a praised film in 1957. Gazzo's screenplays included the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole. Gazzo also made his mark in front of the cameras, portraying a succession of screen heavies and winning an Oscar nomination in 1974 for his appearance as the turncoat mobster Frank Pentangeli...
...time, but now and then a nonpareil comes along who puts on a good show of inexhaustible radiance. America lost one such rare soul last week when James Merrill died of a heart attack at the age of 68. He was a novelist, an essayist and a playwright, but it's as a poet-the author of 11 volumes of verse, with a 12th forthcoming in March-that he made his ineradicable mark...