Word: playwrighting
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...resembles rock video. There is little plot and less sequence: it is hard to distinguish the present from the profuse flashbacks, yet it doesn't seem to matter. This may not be a cohesive play, but Frank Pugliese, 29, has the distinctive voice and emotive power of a true playwright. His unifying theme is race. Before the action begins, the boys have fatally stomped a black man who invaded their turf to buy a sandwich. They seem capable of redemption: the brightest (Adrian Pasdar) falls passionately if shamefacedly for a black woman (Cynthia Martells). But in this hateful world...
...American playwright uses factual material more imaginatively than Lee Blessing, whether speculating about arms-control negotiations in the witty A Walk in the Woods or ruminating on how the national pastime embodies our darkest heritage in the antiheroic biography Cobb. He hits a new peak in TWO ROOMS, a depiction of a Beirut hostage and his grieving wife that merges harrowing narrative with elegantly poetic, and redemptive, visual and verbal imagery. A brilliant, too-brief off-Broadway staging by James Houghton, starring Jeffrey Hayenga and the unforgettable Laura Esterman, has just closed. The play deserves further productions around the country...
...protagonist is Edward Damson (Michael Pennington), a famous playwright for whom the theater is a religion and its most sacred ritual the revenge- murder that he sees at the heart of Greek tragedy. Edward has a fanatical faith in the cleansing purity of blood vengeance. His wife Helen (Judi Dench), who holds deeply to a liberal belief in fairness and mercy, is his muse and counterbalance -- playing Athena, goddess of reason, to his Perseus, the mythological hero who killed the monstrous Gorgon. The play hinges on the passionate dialectic between these two, which turns ominous when it leaves the realm...
...story is unfolded by Helen in flashbacks after Edward's exile to a Greek island and mysterious death. Her listener, a young professor of theater and would-be biographer, is also the playwright's unacknowledged son from a previous marriage, desperate to know and not to know the father being revealed...
James Lapine, the celebrated director and playwright, conducted a directing workshop on February 18 in Adams House sponsored by the Office of the Arts' Learning from Performers Program...