Word: playwrighting
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FOES BLAST HALL: "AS BAD AS NIXON!" Publication this fall of Peter Hall's Diaries, which chronicles his first eight years at the National (1972-80), has sent Sir Peter's old enemies scurrying to put in their tuppence worth. Playwright John Osborne denounced the book as a "numbing record of banal ambition, official evasiveness and individual cupidity." Opera Critic Tom Sutcliffe of the Guardian argues that "Hall has rewritten the history of the National's early days. It's a matter of setting the record crooked...
Considering the potential promise and relative obscurity of the play, this is a shame. Though it enjoyed a successful Broadway debut with Bette Davis--and a subsequently not-so-successful film adaptation featuring Candice Bergen and Jacqueline Bisset--both play and playwright are little known among contemporary theatregoers. Yet the crisp dialogue and comic sentimentality of the script make for what could be an entertaining evening of theatre...
Ironically, the government almost invited such license as it became more and more lenient. Earlier this year, for example, it tolerated a flowering of experimental and unorthodox dramas. Playwright Gao Xingjian's Bus Stop presented a story about eight people awaiting a bus that never arrives. Conspicuously absent were all the trappings of conventional Chinese drama: plot, moral and exhortation. Meanwhile, thousands of citizens were flocking to a production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, directed by Miller himself at Peking's prestigious Capital Theater. The spectators sympathized so warmly with Bourgeois Protagonist Willy Loman...
Bizet: If Brook and his screenwriter-playwright collaborator, Jean-Claude Carrière, were to present me with this libretto now, yes, I might be intrigued. But I worked within quite different terms, the opéra-comique's of 1875 and my own. Which brings us to the fundamental point that Brook has missed...
...acting careers intersecting. And the assignment is to play brothers. It happened first when they starred as scruffy outlaw brothers in the 1980 film The Long Riders. This week they will be paired again as they take over the leads in the New York City production of True West, Playwright Sam Shepard's role-switching psycho-comedy. Randy, 33, portrays a degenerate con artist who scuttles out of the desert to antagonize his straitlaced screenwriter brother, played by Dennis, 29. The sibling rivalry that propels the plot came more or less naturally for the two. "I loved to torture...