Word: playwrighting
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Odets's inability to escape this 1930s pigeonhole is reflected in the intensely ideological, even didactic, nature of his plays. The public received Odets less as the artist than as an unavowed literary politician, swept into the office of playwright laureate on the strength of the politics spouted in his characters' soliloquies, but just as resoundingly voted out when the political climate had changed...
...Black playwright Gus Edwards also writes about trapped people, but his people are Black and his setting contemporary. Except they might as well be white and the setting Victorian England. Three Fallen Angels concerns a man, his wife and his best friend, a young co-worker. The friend falls for the wife. "I got to kiss you. I got to know how it feels," he says. Completely inarticulate, encased within themselves, the "angels" can only express their feelings physically: erotic dancing, lovemaking, or (how many times have you seen this?) a just-for-fun sparring match between...
...just a skeleton--without context, or poetry, or characters with any stature, or interest or surprise. Or a reason for being, since the play just dribbles off without even a confrontation. Apart from the dancing and loving--where the players get a dilly of a rhythm going--the playwright has directed lugubriously and without humor, although the actors--Bari K. Willerford, Seret Scott and Kevin Davis--suggest that under different circumstances it would be a pleasure to watch them...
...Tiger: this time it's Fits and Starts by Grace McKeaney. The McKeaney play, however, was written five years ago (although the APS doesn't mention it) and performed at the Yale School of Drama. It's a somewhat dated piece of collegiate absurdism by a very sharp playwright, but it seems like Bastille Day next to the other...
...lucky for Playwright Thompson, author of On Golden Pond, that Hepburn brings all her voices to his slight comedy, which is virtually tongue-tied as to passion and skimpily plotted. Hepburn plays Margaret Mary Elderdice, a widow of about 70, who is fiercely independent of mind but whose body is weakening. In the course of the play, physical declivity takes her from a cane to a walker to a wheelchair. Her lifeline is no longer in the palm of her hand...