Word: playwrighting
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...TRAVELER IN THE DARK, playwright Marsha Norman creates a world where BIG concepts dominate: Faith clashes with Doubt, Youth seeks to triumph over Mortality, Innocence is shattered, and Knowledge is modern man's crown of thorns. But the concepts are too big, with too many of them vying for the audience's attention. As a result, the characters and audience are left to flounder in a sea of unanswered questions and un-satisfying answers...
...playwright's words, Traveler is "about a brilliant surgeon, whose intelligence is not enough to save him. Samuel Carter seems to have it all--a beautiful wife, a bright little boy and a dazzling career--but he is a traveler in the dark." Unfortunately, both the bitterness and the self-righteousness of this 40-year-old cynic prove unbearable. Sam preaches his doctrine of atheism and the supremacy of intelligence with more offensive zeal than the loudest Moral Majority proselytizer. Told for so long about his brilliance, Sam comes to believe that he does, in fact, know the truth about...
...raised in him by the educational policy from which this play takes its title are lies. Ginny Carlsen is a white college teacher reduced to showing students how to project an educated image for personnel directors, but prevented from providing substantial learning to sustain their careers or their lives. Playwright Shirley Lauro also has a second meaning in mind for her title, as she crudely but forcefully maneuvers her principal characters toward open admissions of their mutual victimization...
...these emotionally rich roles, Calvin Levels and Marilyn Rockafellow, under Elinor Renfield's forcefully realistic, behaviorally sensitive direction, are at once strong and subtle. They are so good, in fact, that they point up the superficiality of the out-of-school lives the playwright has concocted for them. They seem to have been plucked out of sociology texts rather than absorbed from life, expanding the play's length without usefully expanding our understanding of its people. Nonetheless, the heart of the play is sound, and its beat is worth listening...
When asked why he chose to be a playwright, Shepard answers that he did not choose it. He started out as a musician in a rock band, Shepard explains, and stopped playing music when it became more of a business and less of an aristic enterprise. Shepard describes his own career life as if it, too, were an improvisational play. "I don't see it as any kind of evolution. They [his plays] are all experiments in the dark...