Word: playwrighting
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...anguish of that search lies the profundity of Rabe's work. The playwright is functioning here as far more than a realist with an unsurpassed ear for contemporary speech. What he is saying, finally, is that words have begun to fail. The vocabulary in which his people speak, a jargon derived from televised reductions of reality and popularized psychology, leaves them without the tools they need to know their own minds, let alone the complexities of their shared existence. The bitterest of the many laughs Rabe provides derives from his recognition that the relentless articulateness of his people...
Since his subject is language, he is obliged to define his characters through the rhythms of their speech, and he rises superbly to that most difficult of playwright's challenges. In testing himself, he is testing audiences as well. Usually plays about language call flashy attention to what they are doing. Rabe requires us to understand that when he is examining clichés he is not endorsing them. As with language, so with morality. The sympathy he feels for his mystified characters is not to be understood as approval...
Rauch: A director has to be so humble The actors, the audience, the playwright all know the play so much better than you do. All you can do is open it up and let these people breathe...
...playwright Arthur Kopit, whose works include Wings, Nine, and the current End of the World, four years at Harvard defies encapsulations. What would he title a play about his undergraduate career? "I don't like nostalgia," he says. "I find...
...Class of '59's recollections traffic freely from one unlikely coordinate to the next; from Joan Baez to Fidel Castro, from Santa Claus to bubble baths to fierce religious controversy. "You could do whatever you wanted," recalls the playwright David Rintels...