Word: playwrighting
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Reddin is bringing off a rare double: while his words resound in Rum and Coke, he is onstage 20 blocks away in a manic revival of the 1930s farce Room Service, a portrait of pre-Broadway opening desperation. Reddin winningly playswhat else?--the playwright, a geeky kid from Oswego who eventually has to "die" for an hour and a half so that his show might live. Director Alan Arkin seems too conscious that Room Service was adapted as a Marx Brothers movie vehicle. Mark Hamill, the fresh-faced Luke Skywalker of the Star Wars series, is mustached and growly...
...best new play of the crop is Rum and Coke, a wry, poignant look back at the can-do optimism and patriotic naivete that led the U.S. to stumble into the Bay of Pigs invasion. Playwright Keith Reddin, 29, was a child of four when CIA-backed Cuban insurgents made their disastrous landing in 1961, but he captures with compassion and accuracy the Kennedy Administration's fundamental miscalculation: the belief in a nonexistent Cuban underground that was only waiting for a signal of support to rise up and overthrow Fidel Castro. Reddin presents the Bay of Pigs fiasco...
...March 1 to restage Lyle Kessler's Orphans, another past Steppenwolf venture, in London with a cast featuring Albert Finney. Meanwhile, Sinise, Malkovich and Peterson have all formed film- production companies. Also active in Hollywood is the first voice from the new Chicago theater to emerge into national prominence, Playwright David Mamet, who won a 1983 Oscar nomination for The Verdict and in 1984 received the Pulitzer Prize for his play Glengarry Glen Ross. Mamet's longtime collaborator Greg Mosher, who as artistic director of the Goodman was perhaps the most influential force in shaping Chicago's theater sensibility...
Fences is an import from the Yale Repertory Theater, which also originated Ma Rainey. Once again, Playwright Wilson heaps too much plot onto a slice-of-life structure, but he gives Jones one of the very best roles of his career. Troy Maxson is a frustrated man of 53, a former baseball player who was too old to have made the jump from the Negro leagues to the majors. A former lowlife who has lived for duty, respectability and the right of absolute authority at home, he destroys everything he achieved and leaves no one to mourn him. Jones revels...
...starting, too quick in its resolution. The first half hour of the film has a staggered, disjointed rhythm to it, and the climax is perhaps too abrupt and suddenly tragic. Though Shepard's plays are notorious for their refusal to resolve themselves, what distinguishes him as our most audacious playwright translates less gracefully on the screen...