Word: playwrighting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...decry the decaying world of the modern hero by updating The Odyssey. Vonnegut chokes Happy Birthday Wands June with clamsy ploys to manipulate the audience. Broad and almost cliched themes, sheltered and stereotypical characters, and dialogue which through witty is ultimately limp scar the play. Wanda June is a playwright's mangled by better left in the closet...
...since a good many of the lines have the weary, dying fall of Eliot's poems. Always in Pinter, the dialogue is the drama, and it follows a threefold pattern. The source of the first is his fondness for vaudeville, a predilection he shares with Samuel Beckett, a playwright Pinter vastly admires. The second is the inquisitorial mode: a character is grilled, mocked and menaced. The third is the puncturing of rote responses to reveal emotional vacuity. When Lamb asks Miss Cutts how she gets on with Roote, she replies, "Oh, such a charming person. So genuine." When...
...Scarborough, has transported his company to Houston to present this work and one of his earlier plays, Absent Friends. There is nothing out-of-the-suitcase about Way Upstream, however: the Alley production is perhaps as ambitious a staging as has ever been attempted by a regional theater. The playwright's River Orb has been regurgitated into a 20,000-gal. tank of water; a 24-ft. cabin cruiser has been assembled inside; and a huge sprinkler system has been installed to re-create a summer downpour. Ayckbourn has directed, as he did in Scarborough, and his players move...
...country's true salvation-if he can be made angry enough. Unfortunately, his passivity defeats even his creator, and his belated transformation from mouse to man at Armageddon Bridge seems more like a miracle than an authentic development of character. Beautifully performed, expertly produced and directed by the playwright, Way Upstream is Ayckbourn at his most provocative, but not at his best. -By Gerald Clarke
...faithful. The "company's productions in recent years have seemed static, preserved in amber, cluttered with the gestures and mannerisms of venerated ghosts. There has been too much reverent looking backward to the epochal moment in 1875 when Richard D'Oyly Carte induced the highly successful playwright William Schwenck Gilbert to write the libretto that became...