Word: playwrighting
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Pinter probably has fewer women in his dramas than any other major modern playwright. When they do appear, they are almost invariably presented as mothers or whores. In his superbly crafted and deeply felt The Homecoming, he merged both roles in the sibylline central figure of Ruth. In that sense Betrayal is a dramatically interesting departure, for Emma is not really a mother/whore character. It is also a mettlesome test for Blythe Danner, who is one of the most formidably gifted younger actresses on the U.S. stage. Otherwise, Betrayal, which contains the most pauses of any Pinter play, is something...
...collection of long profiles, originally published in The New Yorker, which reflect what the author calls "my abiding obsession with the skills that enable a man or woman to seize and hold the rapt attention of a multitude." His current choices: British Actor Ralph Richardson; Czech-born British Playwright Tom Stoppard; Johnny Carson, board chairman of the American talk show; Comedian and Movie Producer Mel Brooks; and Louise Brooks (no relation), film beauty and sex symbol of the 1920s...
...please both his subjects and his readers. He is dazzled by Stoppard's stylish pessimism and flashy wordplay, yet wisely blocks him from the company of Beckett, Nabokov and Oscar Wilde. Deftly, Tynan puts his judgment of Stoppard in the book's foreword: "A uniquely inventive playwright who has more than once been within hailing distance of greatness." The piece itself is an adulatory delight, especially a scene in which Stoppard emerges as a game-saving hero of Harold Pinter's cricket team after Pinter and his lover, Lady Antonia Fraser, retire to a nearby...
...Seven years after losing her father on the Titanic in 1912, Peggy came into her share of the Guggenheim copper fortune and departed for the bohemia of Paris and London. She flamboyantly dallied with writers and artists: two became her husbands (including Painter Max Ernst), many her lovers (including Playwright Samuel Beckett). Bored and between husbands in 1938, she began to collect art, later and anonymously sponsor young artists, adopting the motto "Buy a painting a day." When the Louvre declared in 1940 that her Dalis, Mirds and Picassos were not worth the effort of hiding them from the Nazis...
...there that Moliére (Philippe Caubère) learned his craft and began writing the first of his farces, which were to make him France's greatest comic playwright. His troupe returned to Paris and gained the patronage of the young Louis XIV, who was then a mere sparkler compared with the great Sun King he was to become. Like all satirists, Moliére wrote from anger and disappointment, however, and his sharp attacks on the reigning conventions infuriated the clergy and its conservative supporters. Even Louis had to bow to the pressure, and Tartuffe, perhaps...