Word: playwrighting
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FROM TITLE to finish, there's little subtlety in The End of the World With Symposium To Follow. Under glaring lights, actors hyper-project their lines. Buzzers and phones eerily ring out at startling volumes. At one point, the central character, playwright Michael Trent (Ken Howard), literally bangs a drum to pound his message across...
Thus with The End..., we watch (listen carefully) a play about a playwright trying to write about a play about the nuclear issue. In the first moments, Michael Trent is approached by a very wealthy mystery man named Philip Stone (Jeremy Geidt), who has devised a brief dramatic outline concerning nuclear war. He offers Trent a huge commission to base a play upon it. With stern eyes and a solemn bearing, Geidt is wonderfully menacing as he compels the confused playwright to take on the task. As Trent, Howard displays a suitably messy mixture of opportunism, hesitation, and curiosity...
...written in English rather than his native Russian. But Adapter Michael Frayn has achieved the satisfying illusion of one in Wild Honey, a dizzyingly funny romantic farce culled from Chekhov's untitled, and by most estimates unproducible, first extant play. Frayn is best known in the U.S. as the playwright of Noises Off, a slapstick send-up of British sex comedy, and Benefactors, a regretful recollection of the relations between two young professional couples. Wild Honey marries the wry and the rowdy strains in Frayn's writing and at the same time prefigures Chekhov's later plays, notably The Cherry...
During the '30s Hollywood became a roost for an astonishing assortment of wanderers and political refugees. Playwright Bertolt Brecht despised Hollywood but scuttled about trying to get work (his evil city Mahagonny, a net for pleasure lovers, gives Friedrich his title). Igor Stravinsky, Friedrich relates, tried to write movie music but never succeeded. When Producer Irving Thalberg offered $25,000 for a score for The Good Earth, the distinguished and threadbare atonalist Arnold Schoenberg demanded $50,000 and the right to direct the actors, who, he felt, should chant their lines...
...case before an immigration appeals board. But in a federal lawsuit she is pressing a separate challenge to McCarran-Walter itself. Her suit has been joined by PEN American Center, a writers' advocacy group, and eight prominent American authors, including Novelists Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and Alice Walker and Playwright Arthur Miller...