Word: playwrighting
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What does this self-conscious display have to do with Chekhov's The Seagull? On the whole, not much. The awkward playwright of Chekhov's script and Artistic Director Peter Sellars of the American National Theater in Washington share a bold if at times risible "search for new forms." But within the arcane visual framing, Sellars has mounted an intelligent reading by a cast notably including Colleen Dewhurst. He makes a case that the play is above all about jealousy and offers an electrifying moment near the end, when the words of the play-within-a-play suddenly take...
...eighth annual Kennedy Center gala in Washington, the honorees--avant- garde Choreographer Merce Cunningham, 66, Actress Irene Dunne, 81, Comedian Bob Hope, 82, Playwright-Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, 67, Composer Frederick Loewe, 84, and opera's Beverly Sills, 56--were wined and dined for two days, but not quite as usual. Cunningham, "the non sequitur of the evening," said his publicist, was served special macrobiotic dinners. And Dunne, disappointedly, was unable to attend the grand finale after back-pain medication made her ill. Hospitalized, she sent word that "the show should go on," and that it did, in a star...
...Shepard's voice has often seemed querulous or cruelly funny. Even as he was attracting an avid following as perhaps America's foremost active playwright, critics sensed in his plays a compulsive urge toward violence, a lack of compassion, a reveling in the bizarre. His comic scenes made viewers wonder whether he was laughing with or at his characters. His work has shifted from expressionist flights of fancy to a kind of grim, weird naturalism and has tended more and more to portray families as the poisoned wellspring of human evil. He has brought to life the same fumbling, feckless...
Until now. Shepard, 42, last week unveiled A Lie of the Mind, the newest, longest (3 hours 45 minutes) and best of his 40-odd plays. Staged off-Broadway by the playwright, Lie superficially resembles yet another Shepardian slice of life among borderline psychotics of the underclass. It opens with the confession of an uncontrollably jealous man (Harvey Keitel) who has beaten his innocent wife (Amanda Plummer) and left her for dead. Before it is over, characters have been shot, pummeled, enslaved and murdered. Yet the play's real action is a coming to terms with the past...
CAHOOT'S MACBETH also has its clever moments. Stoppard wrote the play under the direction of Czechoslovakian playwright Pavel Kohout, who experienced the decade of "normalization" following the fall of the Dubcek government in his country. During this period, the government prevented many people, including actors, from pursuing their careers. This repression provides the context for the second play...