Word: playwrighting
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...more than you have," says Sir Roy, who has spent about 25 years of his life teaching adults and lecturing on adult education. The assumption is that art can tangibly improve the quality of a person's life--stimulating and sharpening his imagination, so, in the words of British playwright Arnold Wesker, he can make "imaginative leaps of understanding and perception" without which he would be "insensitive, purposeless, charmless and finally, destructive...
...first shot focuses on a pair of black hands striding over piano keys, then pulls back to reveal a nickelodeon screen whose newsreel image is closing in on some machinery. Step back for the long shot; move in for the closeup. Distance and involvement, irony and sympathy. Working with Playwright Michael Weller, his collaborator on the 1979 film version of Hair, Forman concentrates on one main story and one subplot-Coalhouse Walker's rise to notoriety and Evelyn Nesbit's career as America's first sex goddess-and only glances at or ignores the rest. By taking...
...locale is Hazelhurst, Miss., and the time is "five years after Hurricane Camille," Playwright Henley's little hint that this clan is disaster-prone. Lenny MaGrath (Lizbeth Mackay), the eldest sister, is facing her 30th birthday with "a shrunken ovary" and no gentlemen callers in sight. She is plain of face, finicky in manner and gnawed by self-doubt. She had a heartfelt romance once but skittered away from it in fear and put her emotions in a deep freeze. The kind of event that nails her hysterically to her sun-drenched kitchen wall and illustrates Henley...
...makes her sound just like the lady in the Scott Towels commercials--"but I'm no good for a character." Well, she said it. This really is a meretricious, slapdash little nothing of a play--there are better improvisations in acting classes. But Lanford Wilson is considered a major playwright in some circles (particularly the Circle Rep, whose production this is), and it's easy to imagine APS's artistic director Tom Bloom crouched under Wilson's kitchen table, pouncing ferociously on falling scraps...
...inflict the sting of truth just as surely as those of a good caricaturist. But Durang tends to end his plays unconvincingly, in a spasm of violence, as if he had been brooding on deeper things all along-like, say, man's fate. It is as if the playwright as jester suddenly dropped his mask and wished to be acknowledged as a thinker. These two one-acters at Manhattan's Playwrights Horizons Theater display both Durang's virtues and his defects...