Word: playwrighting
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Czechoslovakia's Vaclav Havel was just an oppressed dissident playwright when he received an invitation last year to give the keynote address at the 1990 Salzburg music and drama festival. He accepted, figuring he would not be allowed to attend since the Communist government had not let him leave the country in many years. But now Havel is the government -- and he had R.S.V.P.ed, after all. So off to Mozart's birthplace the Czechoslovak President went last week, even if it did mean meeting his Austrian counterpart, Kurt Waldheim, thus breaching the international isolation imposed on the Austrian leader because...
...Waldheim thought he would get a p.r. windfall from Havel's visit, he underestimated his man. Though a beaming Waldheim introduced Havel to the crowd in glowing terms, the playwright President did not return the compliment. Instead, using language that was indirect but clear enough, he verbally lacerated his opposite number, who for years concealed his service as an officer in a German army unit linked to Nazi atrocities in the Balkans during World War II. Choosing the fear of history as his theme, Havel called "the expectation that one can glide through history unpunished and rewrite...
...chronicles gay life through the liberated 1960s; if White lives long enough, he hopes to complete the series with novels about the frenzied bathhouse '70s and the plague-ridden '80s. In the meantime he is working on a biography of Jean Genet and teaching courses on the French playwright and on creative writing at Brown University. Although his semiautobiographical coming-out themes are staples of gay fiction, White has transcended the genre with his wit, attention to sensuous detail and intensely explicit style. Stripping himself as bare as any writer in history, he writes with a passion that is meant...
Essayists on the American mind usually find it impossible to go much longer than two or three paragraphs before making some reference to Calvinism. But it takes guts for a playwright to make John Calvin, the 16th century theologian, an actual character onstage. Scholars of popular culture frequently assert that the national soul is mirrored in the game of baseball. Yet it takes great faith -- not only in his own intelligence but also in the audience's -- for a dramatist to depict the making of the American imperium through the life of centerfielder Ty Cobb. The nation's theater...
Although the ten-day prediction was a bit optimistic, Ash was in the ballpark. He gives a day-by-day account of the formation of the opposition Civic Forum, the mass demonstrations in the streets of Prague, and the rapid ascension of playwright Vaclav Havel from dissident to president...