Word: playwrighting
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...reinvent the texts as contemporary, or at least to impose some setting and style not obviously intended by the author. Every production needs a point of view, to be sure; no play mounts itself. Yet exciting interpretations almost always result not from invention but from rediscovering something the playwright meant to say. That kind of respectful reading underlies Rumanian Expatriate Lucian Pintilie's eclectic, visually daring version of Ibsen's The Wild Duck at Arena Stage in Washington. The play is frequently seen as a domestic melodrama in which well-intentioned people cause calamities; the climactic suicide of a dreamy...
...Beautiful Laundrette, his film debut, playwright Hanif Kureishi uses a sharp ironic scalpel to cut through the bleakness of the nasty South London setting. He gives us humour and a solid plot along with a sturdy and valuable lesson. A quick and scantily budgeted effort, Laudrette grapples with several major conflicts: between immigrants and natives, different generations and sexes, and even pairs of brothers...
...called himself "the best playwright ever to have defended a murderer at the Central Criminal Court." The claim is neither entirely immodest nor self-deprecating. It is English Author John Mortimer's way of pointing out that the careers he has pursued seldom overlap. A barrister who became a Queen's Counsel and practiced in the loftiest reaches of the British legal system, he might also be described as the best lawyer ever to write for the stage (A Voyage Round My Father), screen (John and Mary) and television (Brideshead Revisited, Rumpole of the Bailey). Now Mortimer, 62, has earned...
Thomas Keneally, 50, is an Australian novelist (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith), playwright (Bullie's House), screenwriter (Silver City) and movie actor (The Devil's Playground). The subjects of his nearly 20 books are equally protean: Joan of Arc, the U.S. Civil War battle at Antietam, World War I armistice negotiations, exploration in Antarctica. His 1982 volume, Schindler's List, set off a literary tempest: although it told of an actual German businessman who saved some 1,300 Jews from the Nazis, the book was awarded Britain's prestigious Booker McConnell prize for fiction, eligible apparently because Keneally used novelistic...
...father (Ed Harris) should take a job out of town, whether the elder son (William O'Leary) should go to college or start adult life, and whether the younger (Anthony Rapp), a child actor, should enter an elite high school or embark on a national tour. (In one of Playwright Furth's slyer jokes, the unnamed play the boy is invited to join is recognizably A Streetcar Named Desire.) The father, who lacks a high school diploma, harangues his family about education and ambition. The mother (Judith Ivey) wants her children to choose for themselves. He makes his points with...