Word: playwrighting
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This string of rosaries and remembrance began quietly enough. Last fall a gentle comedy-drama by a novice playwright tiptoed onto Broadway, after a run at the Manhattan Theater Club. Bill C. Davis' Mass Appeal lived up to its title, and this study of a wise, troubled priest and a rebellious young deacon is still going strong 160 performances later. Around the same time, Christopher Durang's Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You exploded off-Broadway. Written with the vindictive passion of a Jacobean tragedy and performed at a tempo the Marx brothers might have found...
...class. Rogers is one of four young actresses who alternate roles as students and teachers in a Yonkers, N.Y., parochial school back in the '60s. All the tribal rites reprised here have been done before, and better, and too often-at alumnae gabfests, if not onstage-for Playwright Casey Kurtti to pretend to freshness. Alas, freshness-make that impudence-is all School Girls has going for it. The play's antireligious broadsides are clumsy enough to make the viewer resolve to take a nun to lunch...
...once the fussy authoritarian and mischievouse child; Ashley, making her role more urgent by playing it post-Talllulah, with traffic-cop gestures and a sexy voice that can break in mid-syllable like a Fernando Valenzuela screwball. If Agnes of God just fails as an example of the playwright's craft, it shines as a demonstration of three actresses' seductive...
...four young playwright's- Davis is 30, Durang 32, Pielmeier 33 and Kurtti 26- form no cohesive group, no lapsed-Catholic Mafia. They have responded to their shared history in tones ranging from reverence to rage, and no divine law ordains that they must continue to wrestle with the cassocked and habited specters of their youth. Instead, these veterans of Catholic schooling are following the first law of creation: write what you know. The nuns and priests of a generation ago impressed their small charges more than they realized. The steel-edged rulers with which they whacked so many...
...action takes place in the locker room of the Northshore Otters, a triple-A team in Minnesota. Without sentimentality, Playwright Blessing fills the room with phantom memories of long summer after noons, male camaraderie, ambitions and fears. The explosive humor is capped by a murderous bat-swinging binge...