Word: playwrighting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Playwright Beth Henley, 29, parlays down-home truths into hits...
...Beth Henley the person had not existed, Beth Henley the playwright might have invented her. Beneath that quiet exterior, there is the same flamboyance of spirit, the same belief that a crazy quilt of sweet dreams and common sense will somehow keep you warm through the night. Beth's father was a lawyer from Hazlehurst, Miss, (the scene of Crimes), her mother an amateur actress from down the road in Brookhaven (where Firecracker is set). "I was real shy when I was little," Henley says in a molasses drawl just slightly diluted by her years in Los Angeles...
NOSTALGIA can be very pleasant--as a condiment that adds texture, coating, and muting to the surface of events. That The Curse of an Aching Heart, William Alfred's new Broadway play, is so uncritically nostalgic--not even his characters' pain seems to dampen the affection of the playwright summoning up Irish Brooklyn and the 1930s--should not be enough to warrant the unfavorable critical reaction the play has drawn. Sure, the effect on audiences is anything but the slick, lively finish that spells success for so many current musicals; nor does Alfred go in for the angst-packed, Freud...
...Southern California Anthropologist Barbara Myerhoffs study of a community of elderly Jews in a seedy part of Venice. The play attempts to examine not only what it means to be Jewish in America, but what it means to be old. It is an ambitious undertaking, clearly too large for Playwright Suzanne Grossmann, whose script is lachrymose and, in the end, static. Still, the production itself is impeccable, and the cast proves again that one thing Los Angeles is not lacking is superb actors...
More than most Californians, Los Angeles theater folk both love and hate New York. Nothing, so far as many of the locals are concerned, is really good until it has made it in Manhattan. "You can be a success as a playwright out here, but who cares?" laments Kitty Felde, a playwright and actress at the Deja Vu. One of the rare examples of a play that was not a success in New York but has been a hit in Los Angeles is Tom Topor's courtroom drama Nuts, which has proved a financial salvation for Susan Dietz...