Word: playwrighting
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...families pop into each other's houses, exchange presents, share holidays. So long as they accept each other at face value, the relationship works. But when they stop to examine what they really know about each other, they uneasily sense that their affection could be based on what Playwright Hugh Whitemore calls a Pack of Lies...
Some writers live off their work; others live in it. On the evidence of Michael Hastings' austere docudrama, Thomas Stearns Eliot--banker, publishing executive, playwright, premier poet of this century--passed his domestic life on automatic pilot, while his mind found refuge and flourished in the Waste Land. The play's Tom (Edward Herrmann) finds it "an enormous effort to be trivial" with people. He husbands his passion for the empty page. He is the hollow man, a prune and a prude with the secret sin of genius, which must not be dissipated in ordinary intercourse. This Olympian diffidence, Hastings...
When PBS adapted three John Cheever stories for TV in 1979, Playwright A.R. Gurney Jr. (The Dining Room, Scenes from American Life) seemed ideally suited to write one of the scripts. Gurney has been for the stage what Cheever was for fiction: the foremost chronicler of the foibles and angst of the Wasp upper middle class. The adaptation succeeded. But it also pointed up a significant difference between Cheever's striving suburbia and Gurney's blue- blood Buffa- lo: while many of Cheever's bedeviled characters are avidly accumulating, almost all of Gurney's etiolated aristocrats are watching the family...
...creative efforts, with contributions by the director, designers and actors. Says he: "The play, while the most important aspect, is not the only one." Brustein draws a distinction between new plays and those already in the canon. When staging a premiere, a director should respect the letter of the playwright's intentions. "The analogy is with Shakespeare," says Brustein. "The first performance of Antony and Cleopatra put Cleopatra on stage in a hoop skirt. Does that mean that all future productions should...
Perhaps not. But increasingly, well-known playwrights are using legal pressure to insist that their intentions are respected. Last week Arthur Miller for the second time forced an avant-garde Manhattan theater troupe, the Wooster Group, to stop using portions of his play The Crucible in a production called L.S.D. In August, Edward Albee compelled a Texas stage company, Theater Arlington, to cut short its revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The production had converted Albee's squabbling heterosexual couples into a quartet of gay men. The director points to the oft-repeated rumor that this was Albee...