Word: playwrighting
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...operatic dreadnought -- playwright David Henry Hwang, choreographer Quinny Sacks, set designer Robert Israel and director David Pountney are also aboard -- manages to embrace not only the explorer's first trip to the New World but also the electric dreams of Stephen Hawking, the arrival of aliens on Earth during the Ice Age, and humanity's conquest of space. Characters sing suspended in outer space, sets soar through the air like rocket ships, and the hydraulic stage heaves like waves in a storm, propelling the extraterrestrials and Columbus' crew alike toward their unknown destinations. With a commissioning fee to Glass...
...concept of the play would appear to be both simple and unique, and it probably would be for any other playwright--but not for A. R. Gurney. To get some perspective on this play, look at two other Gurney plays that have been produced recently in the region, namely, The Fourth Wall and The Cocktail Hour. Including The Dining Room, the three plays have strikingly similar concepts: a certain object or tradition is chosen as the title and focal point of the play, and then the characters reveal their plot all in the context of the object...
Apart from some questions of structure, the play does have many aspects worthy of praise. The variety of scenes and characters is a novel concept, and was deftly handled by the playwright. One might fear that the numerous scenes and characters would be utter chaos on the stage with a cast of six, but Gurney's handling of the scenes lives up to the playwright's fame...
...PLAYWRIGHT...
...decades ago, between acting jobs, David Mamet worked in a real estate & office. There, the playwright later recalled, salesmen peddled "tracts of undeveloped land in Arizona and Florida to gullible Chicagoans." It was a chance to observe up close these dinosaurs of capitalism ("An idea," Mamet said, "whose time has come and gone") working their cold-blooded performance art on people too nice to say no. Mamet dramatized the experience in the 1983 play Glengarry Glen Ross, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and has now brought it, intact and enhanced, to the screen...