Word: playwrighting
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...play opens as Gordon, a shy bartender played with candor and sensitivity by Andrew Barth, is writing a personals ad. He is, in the playwright's own words, a "narrator left in the dark." Like Will Self's hermaphroditic Oxford don, Gordon is a postmodern creation. Recently, it has become deceptively easy to label anything vaguely eccentric as postmodern. But The Wombs of Angel Street, with its rejection of cause-effect linearity and its characters' use of subjective imagination to recreate reality, clearly embraces some of the genre's conventions...
Director Angels Delichatsios stays true to the playwright's original time period and location without denying the modern-day American implications inherent in the piece. For instance, Jimmy (James McPartland) and Cliff (David Marmor) slouch front and center in easy chairs for most of the performance like Beavis and Butthead precursors, flipping through newspapers as if they were television channels...
...Bullets Over Broadway," is, however, generally a success, and Cusack is generally quite good. He plays David Shayne, an aspiring playwright in 1920's New York, whose second play will be staged on Broadway, thanks to a deal made by a respected producer (Jack Warden) with the gangster Nick Valente (Joe Viterelli). The deal is this: Nick will bankroll the play in return for a role for his girlfriend, Olive (Jennifer Tilly...
...stroke!" (as he was doing her left foot, she thunders, "the pain was terrible"). She overacts so gorgeously that when she apostrophizes Shayne ("O pungent, seething artist!") the ludicrousness of the line is not too much for her to carry off. Even Rob Reiner (as the crusty, unsuccessful playwright Sheldon Flender) manages to tell Shayne, who is cheating on his wife (Mary-Louise Parker), that the artist "creates his own moral universe" with a straight face...
Like the Bard, Friel has warmed to the human condition as he develops as a playwright. His latest play, Dancing at Lughnasa, presents as different a perspective on the world from that of his first play, Faith Healer, as The Tempest does from Hamlet. The themes--of the ambiguity, uncertainty and misunderstanding that wrack our lives--endure. But in Dancing at Lughnasa, through the sordid banality and chaos, Friel strikes an indulgent, optimistic note...