Word: playwrighting
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...Harvard-affiliated American Repertory Theater (ART) will maintain its ties to Broadway next spring by presenting Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman's newest work, an ART spokesman said yesterday...
Perhaps if Julian Lowenfeld as Serge could express overpowering impatience, anguish, and self-doubt (the three emotions the playwright relies on), we might take the shaky underpinnings of the play on faith. But though Lowenfeld is intermittently believable, he has an unfortunate habit of substituting decibels for modulations in expression and timbre. His loud rages are contrived rather than compelled: Gabriel, rocking silently in his chair, is the more effective emblem of the family's failure to communicate without hurting. As Monique says after Serge has thoughtlessly ignored her: "That's the first thing we should learn in life...
LAST SATURDAY'S production of Deathtrap destroyed a Lowell House dining hall chair. In the middle of the first act, fading playwright Sidney Bruhl strangles a young admirer who has written a better play than Bruhl ever could. Dramatic realism aside, his attack was so savage that the chair smashed to the floor as the two struggled around the stage...
...Along the way NASA adds Glenn (Ed Harris). Alan Sheperd (Scott Glenn). Scott Carpenter (Charles Frank) and Wally Schirra (Larrie Henriksen). But Yeager remains on the California desert to continue his test runs which seem every bit as heroic as his counterparts' trips into space. As portrayed by the playwright Sam Shepard, Yeager stands above the rest. His humility, perseverance and courage imply that even someone not lionized by the media may just possess all the right stuff as well. And the movie's reluctance to abandon Yeager, even after the rest have headed to Cape Canaveral, reveals Kaufman...
...FREQUENT BEST, playwright Sam Shepard uses grisly explorations of family frictions and anxieties to roil up the audience in the way every good dramatist should. The Curse of the Starving Class, the last of a stark family-history trilogy, abounds in this desired therapeutic grittiness. Its characters' unpleasantness produce just the kind of irksome self-questioning and squirming that Aristotle prescribed 1500 years ago, the kind that makes going to the theater more than just entertainment. In Curse, only occasionally do Shepard, and the generally able troupe presenting it at the Loeb, stumble out of the realm of theatrical effectiveness...