Word: playwrighting
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...Stasi--East Germany's internal spy network--is in full fester, keeping watch on artists and political dissidents, forcing many into obeisance or jail, silence or suicide. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a mousy Stasi captain, plants bugs in the home of chic playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Wiesler and his coarser superiors have motives as complex as they are nasty: to please a party boss, to tease out scenarios of voyeuristic lust and, well, because they can. Wiesler has another reason to spy and pry: he's good...
...Simon is back on Broadway, where he is the only living playwright to have had a theater named for him. He rounds out his autobiographical trilogy with Broadway Bound, a tough and unsettling recollection of the breakup of his parents' marriage and of how he walked out on that wreckage to launch his own career. The play's central image, its emotional climax, is that long-contemplated connection of mother and son, talking and dancing and?for just a moment?spiritually touching. "Until I wrote it," says Simon, "I had not fully resolved how I truly felt about my mother...
...being the majority backer of his plays, which nowadays cost around $800,000 to mount. Nor will the show's fate much affect his power: his record is so strong that his name appears above the title on many of his plays and movies, a rare honor for a playwright and an all but unprecedented one for a screenwriter who is not also a director. Virtually anything Simon writes will be produced?if he permits it. His collaborator on nine films, Producer Ray Stark, says Simon "will bring in the most wonderful material and then, two weeks later, when...
...craftsman, Neil Simon may finally come to be regarded as an artist. Says John Randolph, who plays Simon's grandfather in Broadway Bound: "It was classic, that opening night in Washington. He spent all these years waiting for some critic to recognize that he is a major, important, serious playwright, which this play proves. And as soon as he had a copy of a review saying that, he was absolutely overcome...
...audiences who come to the theater for feeling rather than anesthesia, for honesty rather than comfort, Broadway Bound should firmly establish Simon's standing in the top rank of American playwrights. He does not attempt to do what Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard have done: create their own worlds and mesmerize viewers into them. Simon evokes a world very much like the viewers' own and entices them into confronting their own feelings. Broadway Bound is the work of a master craftsman, at once literary and heartfelt, shaped with becoming modesty. It is unmistakably urban and Jewish...