Word: playwrighting
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...sensitivity. Da is irresistible because its love has charmisma: it is cheery and optimistic, cute and funny, honest and poignant. Superbly acted by Barnard Hughes, who played the title role 549 times of Broadway before hitting the road, this version of Da exemplifies the work of a master playwright who not only listened to the voices in his head but understood their meaning as well...
Hugh Leonard writes plays by listening to the voices in his head. Like most of his other works, Da is autobiographical, but it does more than bring to life the childhood memories of a middle-aged playwright: it beautifully recreates a father, typical in his unworldliness, his humility, and the sincerity of his love for his only son, Charlie...
...living mix with the dead in Da as well. Charlie, a middle-aged playwright, returns to his Irish homestead to bury his Da, his father. He tries desperately to destroy all his memories of the man, anxious to forget even the happy moments in a frustrating childhood. But hounded by the playwrights' curse, he cannot ignore the voices of the past. Charlie hears the voices so clearly that, as in Our Town, they climb again into their bodies. Soon his Da is smoking in an arm chair, his mother baking in the kitchen, and he, as a teenager, reading...
...trend that invites such inquiries has been developing for quite a while. It had started well before it was dramatized in the memorable gymnastics of Sammy Davis Jr. flinging his little arms about Richard Nixon. Franklin Roosevelt, in fact, enlisted Playwright Robert Sherwood as a ghost, and subsequent Presidents increasingly turned to theatrical artisans for help, especially after TV got big. By the 1970s the political scene seemed so stagey that Anthropologist Edmund Carpenter was moved to say that "the White House is now essentially a TV performance." He exaggerated, but not by much...
...with all his histories, Shakespeare takes certain liberties with the actual course of events during King John's reign; he never mentions the Magna Carta, for instance. In trying to compress 30 years into an evening's entertainment, the playwright condenses many battles into slightly dull and strategy-filled second half. Aside from Pearson, the actors in this half seem unaware of the full motivation behind Shakespeare's lines...