Word: playwrighting
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Normal Heart reviews the unfolding of the epidemic through the eyes of a querulous but sincerely righteous gay activist. Audience members may feel inclined to tune out during the protracted debate over the direction of gay political movements, and Playwright Kramer belabors his belief that the proper response to AIDS is universal sexual abstinence, at least among gays. But he captures the panic and self-hatred that AIDS has unleashed. He dishes up highly imaginative invective, not least toward a character based upon himself. And he creates a complex, interesting romance between his surrogate, played by Brad Davis (who starred...
...office failure, he went on writing, morning after diligent morning, no matter how he had misspent the night before. That poignant fact confers dignity on what was otherwise the pathetic wreckage of genius. Unlike Eugene O'Neill, his chief rival for the laurel as America's greatest playwright, Williams left no posthumous masterpiece. Indeed, unless future generations discern something more than glimmers of incandescence in the murky, forgettable plays of his last two decades, his effective career may be said to have stopped after the production of Night of the Iguana in 1961, when he was 50. He staggered...
...evocation. Donald Spoto might seem up to the task, based on his shrewd if unadmiring assessment of Alfred Hitchcock in The Dark Side of Genius. But Spoto's The Kindness of Strangers is merely thorough, precise and methodical. Almost perversely, it stops short of risking deep perception of the playwright or his plays: it focuses instead on a tedious hunt for the minutiae of names, addresses and trivial incidents that made their way from Williams' life into his art. Spoto's writing lacks lilt, and his themes often bog down in a glut of detail. The book's most conspicuous...
...resentment against their parents. From the very first lines, parents and their failure to nurture and to love their kids are blamed for about 85 percent of the world's evils. That might be okay if the script were consistently kept to the runaways' perspectives out too often playwright's thetoric intrudes. This is particularly annoying in a monologue like. "To The Dead of Family Wars," though Lois Johnson musters up enough conviction and passion for the occasion...
Days and Nights Within portrays the relationship between a suspected spy (Beth Dixon) and her Communist interrogator (Ken Jenkins). Playwright Ellen McLaughlin has devised some imaginative, lyrical dream sequences, and the acting, especially Dixon's, throbbed with suppressed emotion, but the story provides no revelatory payoff...