Word: playwrighting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...these problems, the production still draws you in, makes you want to find out what the play is hiding. Unfortunately, there may be nothing there to find. Any message seems lost in the playwright's preoccupation with experimenting with then-new techniques...
DIED. Enid Bagnold, 91, British playwright and novelist whose elegant, carefully wrought works include the Broadway and London hit The Chalk Garden (1955) and the 1935 novel National Velvet, which nine years later became a film starring Elizabeth Taylor, then twelve years old; in London. Bagnold, who was married for 42 years to Sir Roderick Jones, longtime chairman of the Reuters news agency, demanded three hours every day for writing in their 35-room mansion in Rotting-dean, Sussex...
Rafelson, however, refuses to let these betrayals unwind in their own frenetic fashion. Scenes of furious violence are undercut by his reluctance to leave the action before every angle has been explored. The result is a collection of brilliant scenes which don't seem to be related in time. Playwright David Mamet has taken most of the xenophobia and complication out of Cain's novel, and left in their places huge gaps for Rafelson to muse over. But one suspects Rafelson didn't even notice...
Sometimes a dramatist offers one special clue as to his intent, and British Playwright Davies seems to do that when he has Rose quote a line from the German socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg: "It's in the tiny domestic struggles of individual people as they grope towards self-realization that we can most truly discern the great movements of society." The play's title may be an oblique salute to Rosa...
...famous French murder case that inspired Jean Genet's The Maids. In 1933, in Le Mans, Léa and Christine Papin killed their employer, Mme. Lancelin, and her daughter. Kesselman has retained the names of the sisters, but otherwise the play is very much her own. The playwright focuses on mother-daughter relationships, intimate sisterly affection and a rigid class structure that borders on the feudal droit du seigneur...