Word: playwrighting
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...puritanism and dogmatism. In 1979 Deng released the country from the cultural straitjacket of the Mao era, admitting Shakespeare and Updike, Mickey Mouse and Muhammad Ali, the Beatles and the Boston Symphony. In the following year, however, he endorsed a brutal backlash. By 1981 leftist ideologues were publicly censuring Playwright Bai Hua, who had dared to let one of his characters ask her father, "You love your motherland, but does she love you?" The following month, Bai was given a national award for his poetry by the Ministry of Culture. When Bai wrote another play last year, he took...
...pitched battles between speech and silence. The speaker marshals all the resources of colloquial language-wit, wheedling, anecdote, abuse-while the listener waits out his opponent and, often as not, wins the battle by withholding approval, by being as silent as God. Such, too, is the uneasy symbiosis of Playwright Pinter and his audience. In these three short plays that Alan Schneider has mounted off-Broadway (two of them first performed at London's National Theater in 1982, the third earlier this year), Pinter dramatizes this relationship through three memorable audience surrogates, each a displaced person from an intellectual...
...German Democratic Republic, a nation as distinct from West Germany as are two other German-speaking nations, Austria and Switzerland. But after 40 years of division the yearning to transcend the ideological boundaries that divide East and West Germany is still strong. Ulrich Plenzdorf, an East German novelist and playwright whose works sell on both sides of the Wall, argues that "no matter how many adjectives the system may use to describe itself, the 'German' remains." When a West German border guard once asked Leipzig Painter Bernhard Heisig how long he intended to stay in "Germany," Heisig promptly...
Strokests often excrutiatingly funny, but the playwright's intentions remain obscure. Leslie Glass writes dialogue as absurd as a cross between lonesco and "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," but the one-liners and hilarious situations lead nowhere. As a satire on the American family, the play never succeeds on the level of Albee's American Dream although the relentless reinforcement of American stereotypes leads us to expect as much. But for black comedy Strokes can't be beaten...
...high seriousness. On the night of Feb. 10, 1949, when Salesman opened on Broadway the first time, Arthur Kennedy, the original Biff, recalls wandering around in a daze between acts, encountering Miller, and asking him how he thought the play was going. "The issue is not in doubt," the playwright firmly replied; and now it seems even the last pockets of resistance must finally yield to his astonishing, youthful 33-year-old's confidence. What has arrived on Broadway is, assuredly, a classic of the modern theater. And one leaves it not with a sense of relief...