Word: playwrighting
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...rare space between hallucination and vision. It is the place inhabited by all manner of fakes, fakirs, savants, pseudos and seers. It is the testing ground of gullibility and genius, and sometimes these are just the qualities Shepard exhibits. When he tips to one side, he's our best playwright and he has the ability to short circuit the intellect with all the subtlety of a file on the teeth. When he tips in the other direction, his short circuits more resemble the random firing of brain synapses and he is in danger, as Tom McGuane says of "being trapped...
DIED. Yevgeni Kharitonov, 40, Russian poet and playwright; of a heart attack; in Moscow. Last year, with six other Soviet writers, Kharitonov sought to form a literary club and publish an experimental journal; the KGB seized their unpublished manuscripts. Kharitonov once wrote ironically that writers need restrictions because "violating them provides the nerve...
Biographer Richard Layman has gathered most of the clues to this puzzling case. He got no help from Playwright Lillian Hellman, Hammett's friend and frequent companion during the last 30 years of his life, but this handicap is not crippling. Hammett had done his best work by the time he met Hellman. The crucial years, when he raised pulp writing to the level of art, were already behind...
Sure, the playwright was penning propaganda to some extent (as we find in plenty of great drama from the 15th-century Everyman through much of Ibsen to most of Brecht). But he was also doing a good deal more, for Shakespeare is rarely as simple as he is often made out to be. There are ironic subtexts in the play; and the dramatist includes inglorious aspects of war as well as unbecoming traits in Henry's character. The Bard gave us something far more complex than a cardboard king of diamonds, as more and more people are coming to realize...
...dealt with another problem by persuading Plummer to play not only Henry but also the Chorus, who columniates the work with six arias that bridge the gaps in this epic tale and apologize for the shortcomings of the stage. More important, however, is the Chorus' role, not as the playwright's mouthpiece, but as the 16th-century public's general view of Henry. This popular consensus is far from identical with the man Shakespeare drew in the play proper, and the difference is undercut by having Henry describe himself. In fact, it would be so embarrassing for Henry to deliver...