Word: playwrighting
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...movie began as a screenplay written for Bette Midler by playwright Paul Rudnick (Poor Little Lambs, I Hate Hamlet). When she said no thanks, the script became an orphan with many foster parents, and the usual Hollywood bustle commenced, with a new star and half a dozen new writers (including Carrie Fisher). In arbitration, the Writers Guild ruled that Rudnick was the only writer who deserved screen credit, but he declined the honor. "Joseph Howard" is the pseudonym for a committee...
...these people see themselves as morally normal -- and playwright Alan Ayckbourn, Britain's leading comedist, plainly thinks they are. Although the corruption depicted in A Small Family Business embraces fraud, the Mafia and murder, it takes place in bland, beige, suburban houses where the residents are preoccupied with recipes, hemlines and their dogs. And while the accents are recognizably British, the decor and, by implication, the bad behavior would seem right at home in Middle America...
...Playwright George C. Wolfe, best known for his unsparing satire in The Colored Museum, plainly has grander ambitions in mind for Jelly's Last Jam, a biography of composer and performer Jelly Roll Morton. The show is as much a review of Morton's racial politics and ethnic fealty as of his musical contribution as the asserted "inventor of jazz." The central plot point is that Morton was of mixed-race Creole ancestry and prided himself on his relative whiteness, even while immersing himself in, and transforming, black music. The show's theme is that neither he nor any black...
Robert J. Bouffier, playing John Wisehammer, a convict fascinated by the power of words, also deserves attention. He frequently quotes from Johnson's Dictionary: "abject: a man without hope" and has secret hopes of becoming a playwright. In fact, Wertenbaker makes him the voice for the words which name this play: "True patriots we, for be it understood/We left our country for our country's good." (Incidentally, these lines are generally attributed to George Barrington, but nevermind...
Before August Wilson was a playwright, he was a poet. Although he came to the theater out of the black anger and community activism of the '60s, he was always more interested in language than in agenda, more sensitive to metaphors than to manifestos. At his lyrical best, which he certainly is in the remarkable play that reached Broadway last week after two years of regional development, Wilson can embed subtle and complex political commentary within the conversational riffs of fully realized characters. He can also end an almost actionless slice of life with an abrupt burst of violence, then...