Word: playwrighting
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Sometimes, as with the new romantic comedy Frankie & Johnny, the fantasy is a love song for what's left of New York. Playwright Terrence McNally loves the city as only a recruit from Corpus Christi, Texas, can. Director Garry Marshall, a native New Yorker, loves it as one who has escaped its boundaries but not its nostalgic magnetic pull. So their lovable ex-con Johnny (Al Pacino) may come on to rumpled beauty Frankie (Michelle Pfeiffer) in a workplace seduction straight out of Anita Hill's nightmares, but he's really a sweet guy who can make a cactus bloom...
...their hearts or even voice their feelings. A woman bluntly tells a man trying to seduce her that the romantic method won't work. The central male, informed that someone loves him, replies that no such thing exists. His best friend's mantra: "Everybody lies." To underscore the nihilism, playwright Brad Fraser, 32, interweaves teen folklore of erotic mayhem, references to AIDS and a gradual unveiling of a serial killer -- all with mordant humor (a man going to a pickup bar shouts to his female roommate, "I have a blind date with destiny!"). A hit in Fraser's native Edmonton...
...many scientists see Biosphere 2 as a kook's dream and a rich man's whim: John Allen, who used to call himself Johnny Dolphin, the engineer, ecologist and poet-playwright who hatched the scheme and heads the project, and Texas billionaire Edward Bass, who is financing the venture, have been described as onetime members of a cultlike commune. Biosphere participants have admitted that the degrees some of them received from the Institute of Ecotechnics in London are something of a sham; the institute was set up by Bass to confer legitimacy on the project...
...tattletale, began one of the most famous of America's celebrity unions. With 11-year-old TIME both popular and profitable and newly born FORTUNE a critical success, Harry Luce, then 36, was on the verge of becoming the nation's most powerful magazine publisher. Clare Brokaw -- journalist and playwright, future Congresswoman and ambassador -- at 31 was Manhattan's paradigmatic gay divorcee, renowned as much for her merciless wit as for her delicate porcelain beauty...
...even the Swiss can resist making disparaging remarks about themselves and their country. Poet Carl Spitteler claimed that if the Swiss had created the Alps, they would not have been so high. Playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt noted that his country's vaunted neutrality "makes me think of a virgin who earns her living in a bordello but wants to remain chaste." Not surprisingly, the Swiss celebrated the septicentennial of their confederation this month with restraint...