Word: playwrighting
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WHEN IT CAME to raping and pillaging the works of others, no 20th-century playwright could hold a candle to Bertolt Brecht. The idiosyncratic pinko playwright ranged far and wide in his search for material to transform into his own dramas. He rivaled Shakespeare, the literary grave-robber supreme, in his audacious choice of sources. Twenties cinema, 18th century musicals, Renaissance history, Jack London stories; in Brecht's hands they all became the stuff of his proletarian "epic" theater...
...ORTON was an outrageous homosexual playwright from lowerclass Leicester who lived for 15 years in a one-room flat with his one-time mentor, sometime lover and eventual murderer, Kenneth Halliwell. Precocious as a youth growing up in the 1950s, by the mid-1960s Orton was a rising star in British theater. His daring and almost obscene plays challenged stodgy British society and caught the imagination of forward thinking Englishmen--he even was commissioned to write a screenplay for the Beatles. Revelling in his homosexuality, Orton pursued an endless number of anonymous sexual encounters in public bathrooms, abandoned houses, subway...
...film obliquely raises questions of art and society, but at its heart, Prick Up Your Ears is the story of two intriguing men and their problematic relations. The brilliant performances by Gary Oldman as the randy playwright and Alfred Molina as the whining Halliwell necessarily make the film, because Bennett and Frears have all but ignored the charged times in which the Orton story unfolded. Although painstaking detail masterfully recreates the setting of the story, the filmmakers have largely eschewed an attempt to depict the explosive social scene of 1960s London...
...Sloane, Loot and What the Butler Saw. Through shock, Orton sought to shake up British society. We are given a hint of the stuffy British upbringing Orton received, but too little a taste of Orton's literary product. A snatch of dialogue here or there doesn't convey the playwright's reputed genius. We have to take his word...
...competition with Broadway fare, Miss Daisy last week won Drama Desk Award nominations for Playwright Alfred Uhry, Director Ron Lagomarsino and all three members of the well-nigh perfect cast. Attempts are under way to move it to a larger theater, and eventually it seems fated to follow the traditional happy path of an off-Broadway hit: toward a long and honorable life in regional theaters across America...