Word: playwrighting
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...spend every other Friday night from 1931 to 1944 playing cards, swapping pieties and gibes, and often giggling like ticklish Munchkins. Yes, there are private agonies that not even the trill of Irish laughter can successfully smother, but the lingering mood is fond and bantering, as if the playwright had stumbled into some improbable locker room of maiden aunts. It takes no imagination at all to see this play on Broadway next season with an all-star cast. Before they consider that, producers are invited to check out the A.T.L.'s near flawless octet of biddies...
Awake and Sing! is essentially a story of failed promise. But none was so glaring as the playwright's. Clifford Odets was one of the most applauded writers of his generation; he ended in Hollywood writing unproduced scripts, repudiating his old colleagues and furnishing names to the House Un-American Activities Committee when it came to investigate the film industry. As evidence of his political rightness, Odets showed the Congressmen a pan of Awake and Sing! in the New Masses: "A situation is created out of nothing just to get across a wisecrack." That is not an entirely unfair...
...playwright is confusing in his choice of enemies: in 1970 the Italian Communist Party stopped supporting him because he ridiculed it-as he did such other institutions as the Roman Catholic Church, the Christian Democrats and the CIA.) The playwright himself was stopped at the golden door, but his ideas, the quintessential and presumably most dangerous part of him, were free, theoretically, to sail in and raise hell up and down the American mind, waving torches, screaming anarchy. Somehow they do not seem that incendiary. Fo's creations sometimes look like Bertolt Brecht being done by the Marx Brothers...
Although women writers have held a conspicuous place in the history of modern Russian literature, they have been slow to find their true voices in exile. But a few, like Playwright Nina Voronel, 51, are beginning to be heard by non-Russian audiences in the West. Voronel, consistently thwarted in her attempts to write for the Soviet theater, has had two one-acters produced off-Broadway. In Israel, where she now lives, two full-scale plays have been performed, and a movie and a TV drama have been based on her scripts. Like most emigre authors, Voronel is still drawing...
...character of Stephen suffers from the same lack of definition. Playwright (and audience) can't figure out if he's five or 15: one minute he asks idiotic questions about the meaning of "Humpty Dumpty," and the next he lectures his father on the nature of moral responsibility. Scheller carries off some of the more moving moments of the second act with admirable aplomb, but it seems a crime to saddle a 13-year-old actor with such a large-and inconsistent--role...