Word: playwrighting
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...worst part. The climax takes place at least 15 minutes before the end, and by now the audience knows exactly what will happen, so there is no suspense. Playwright James Kirkwood takes out the humor, so the audience is no longer interested. He leaves us inwardly saying, "End, end, end..." I hate that feeling, but leaving early would have been rude...
...twelfth novel, British Author and Playwright Fay Weldon has taken a giddy leap back to the fiction style of the 19th century. Enough of angst and ambiguity, of literary experiment. Bring on Trollope's nudging narrator and Dickens' moral confidence. The Hearts and Lives of Men -- surely a Victorian novelist would have come up with a livelier title -- is nonetheless set in modern times, specifically the fast-track London art world of the '60s and '70s. It covers 23 years in the lives of Clifford and Helen Wexford, an attractive, careless pair who marry, remarry, have messy affairs, manage...
Wilson is not a "black" playwright in the sense the term was applied in the confrontational 1960s and '70s. He movingly evokes the evolving psychic burden of slavery but without laying on guilt or political harangues. The son of a largely absent white father and a devoted, enterprising black mother whom he revered, Wilson keeps his white characters at the periphery, yet emphasizes the humanity that binds Americans together. Although his vision is steeped in sadness, it is equally rich in humor and wonder at the everyday joys of living, from the umpteenth retelling of a beloved family anecdote...
...mellow. Drawn to the Black Power movement in the 1960s, he helped found a volunteer troupe in his native Pittsburgh that mounted the incendiary works of LeRoi Jones. "I tried to write myself, but I wasn't any good at dialogue," he says -- a surprising judgment for a playwright whose characters speak with color and dialectal authenticity. Within a few years Wilson was hatching the idea for a whole cycle of dramas, reflecting black life in each decade of this century. In 1982, through the playwright-development program at Connecticut's O'Neill Theater Center, he met Lloyd Richards, dean...
...with the tendentious alarmism of the 1960s and with more recent, ham-fisted TV mega- epics such as World War III and The Day After. It is hard to see how any narrative on the subject could avoid being either dogged and dull or archly ironic and malicious. But Playwright Lee Blessing has brought it off. His A Walk in the Woods is a work of passion and power with the ring of political truth. It is not only the best of the few dramas to reach Broadway this season, it is also the funniest comedy...