Word: playwrighting
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Robert Brustein, head of the ART, is a man of taste and discretion. He knows quality when he sees it, and he will go to bat for any playwright he believes in--sometimes to the point of hyperbole. So if this season really boasts the best that America's current dramatists can muster, I suggest a few moments of silence for the passing of the American play...
...that something worthwhile is about to happen, then disappoints you by dropping the theme or hiding behind a convenient cliche. The wasted talents of the director, cast, designers and crew make the spectacle all the more pitiful. Sweettable never bores you; it just makes you want to whack the playwright a few times with a Riverside Shakespeare...
Some middle-class whites think AIDS only infects gays and poor minority- group members. "People believe that the higher the cover charge at a bar, the less likely they're going to run into AIDS," says Anna Gomez, 29, in South Miami's Parallel Bar. Says Playwright (Torch Song Trilogy) and Gay Activist Harvey Fierstein: "It's very hard for straight people to understand what the hell this is. The ugliness of the disease is that every stranger has it; everyone you like doesn't have...
...working under, and early in his play he dismissed Dr. Strangelove's significance to the present-day nuclear situation. He tries to add some Pirandellian interest to the issue by writing End of the World as a play about writing a play on the arms race--incidentally turning the playwright into a heroic comedian a la Neil Simon. Flailing madly for dramatic interest, Kopit scatters references to detective fiction, academia and Beltway culture that are not nearly so hip as kopit thinks. To call the of his efforts "contrived" would be generous indeed...
When Eugene O'Neill got a toothache he turned to Saxe Commins, a dentist known for his light touch. But the playwright's ailing tooth was so stubborn, O'Neill noted, that the dentist "had almost to call in the derrick squad." Nevertheless, extractions proved to be the basis of their relationship for the next 30 years. After Commins left dentistry for publishing, including a quarter-century at Random House, he gently but forcefully drew from O'Neill some of his greatest plays. "Love and Admiration and Respect" is a record in letters and commentary of a remarkably creative friendship...