Word: playwrighting
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...somewhere in between. Asymptotic maunderings, these, on the ineffable relation between art and the artist that animates Mark Leib's brilliant and vertiginously profound Terry by Terry, a new play which joined the American Repertory's repertoire last Friday at the Loeb. Terry is obsessively theatrical--it concerns a playwright and the play he has written, and its most visceral impact is on other writers. But to characterize such concerns as esoteric, to cubbyhole theater as some sort of elite hobby or idle plaything, is to miss the point: art is life, and Terry by Terry confronts the possible extinction...
...playwright Terry is Leib's modern man, a Hamletized intellectual crippled not so much by the burden of the past as by his own lack of conviction and values, unable, in the face of the failure of language and thought, even to speak, much less create a play; powerless, without a belief in absolutes, to believe in the absolute of his art; left, when the only true meaning is in silence, only to groan. Leib has, in a way, belied his vision by actually writing an eminently successful modern play (this should be called Terry by Terry by Terry...
...star of Terry by Terry, if such an invidious term might be allowed, is Robertson Dean, the Terry of Terry Rex. Whining, puling, sparkling with intelligence and wit, posturing like a talented playwright who was once a very bad high school actor, Dean provokes the paradoxical mixture of sympathy and loathing the role calls for--he is us, but we don't have to like him for it. Lisa Sloan is marvelously attractive and genuine as Kathy Marianne Owen, a consummate actress when intact, is literally hobbled by a huge cast on her leg that forces her to lumber around...
Written soon after the masterful Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Enter a Free Man shows us a different Tom Stoppard, a playwright who has curbed (somewhat unwillingly) his absurdist humor and created a sensitive portrait of a man waging a rather pathetic battle with society. The result, an uneasy balance of typical Stoppardesque repartee ("Look at the Japanese! The Japanese inventors are small...") and more down-to-earth pathos, neverthless works as a unit. Enter a Free man may not rank with Stoppard's prize-winning comedies, but it remains a warm and amusing play...
Wedding Band is subtitled A Love/Hate Story in Black and White. Judging from the play's severe contrasts, one assumes that playwright Childress sees a world of rigid irreconcilable extremes. This production of Weeding Band succeeds best, however, when Krieger, Thurston and company avoid extremes, exploring life's gray region of confusion and ambivalence...