Word: playwrighting
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...self--proclaimed experiment in theater--this production is more than satisfactory. The play would benefit enormously from tightening, particularly of the first act, and a smoothing of the transition from satirical farce to personal tragedy. This production leads the script the advantage of consistently fine acting, and gives the playwright, actors, and audience an opportunity to try something new, Now is this a bizarre theater "experience" to be endured for the sake of broadening one's mind. It is funny, fastpaced, and not too long, and these virtues, rare enough anywhere, more than justify this sort of gamble...
...roof again to release his protector. Lately that celestial patron has been off campus on a new mission, fund raising. When Tennessee Williams died last month, the University of the South found itself the principal beneficiary of his estate, reported to be $10 million, despite the fact that the playwright had never attended the college...
That happy circumstance has befallen Slab Boys, a burst of bitter memory from Scottish Playwright John Byrne about the hopeless nights and dreamless days of young men who grind dyes in the "slab room" of a carpet factory near Glasgow. When first produced in New York, off-Broadway in 1980, the play seemed a programmatic denunciation of the social order, as personified by two pompous functionaries and by a blazered young prig who was passing through the slab room on his foreordained...
...themes of privation and sardonic defiance are conveyed at first glance. The set, designed by Playwright Byrne, is the slab room, dingy as a tenement, yet spattered with paint as cheerfully as a Jackson Pollock canvas. The only ornament is a poster of the slab boys' hero, the rebel without a cause, James Dean. Standing beneath it, a young man studiously paints a watch onto his wrist. He soon makes plain what the audience guesses: in this knockabout environment, even a watch is an unattainable badge of advancement...
Harvard, it now appears, may have a hand in administering a multimillion-dollar bequest from the late playwright Tennessee Williams. But dealing in seven-figure donations is a familiar practice for the administrators running the University's on-going $350 million fund-drive...