Word: playwrighting
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...bead curtain, a hand lobs a lump of steel. Thump and roll. "Grenade!" Soldier scoops it up, hesitates in stupid disbelief. FLASH! BLAM! So begins-and 140 minutes later, in an almost exact replay, so ends-The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. Between these two unanswerable exclamation points, Playwright David Rabe strings the lifeline of the soldier, Pavlo; then on that cord he attempts to hang what he sees as the rags of national honor, bloodied by the Viet...
...that Small Craft Warnings is on a par with the durable canon of his finest plays. Here he reminds us of the size and scope of his genius, but dis plays it diminuendo. Call this then a five-finger exercise from the man who is the greatest living playwright in the Western world...
...Every playwright might do well to inscribe a verse from the English Book of Common Prayer on his wall or his mind: "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done." A few plays fail through unbelievable incompetence. Many more fail (aesthetically if not commercially) through a casual neglect of the basic elements of theater. Drama needs plot, character and conflict. Drama needs language of resonance, tempo and style-something more than a faithful reproduction of what people say at college commencements, dog tracks...
...DUPLEX. Black Playwright Ed Bullins is engaged in an ambitious cycle of 20 plays depicting the nature and quality of black life in the U.S. The plays seem to resemble sections of track stamped "destination unknown." This is the price of writing drama that is all middle, with no discernible beginning or end. Bullins is rich in mood, poor in plot...
...sizable segment of that after-hours world consists of drinking, whoring, gambling and fighting. Bullins would probably get frothing mad at any white (playwright or not) who said some of the things that he says about blacks. He disowns the Lincoln Center production of The Duplex as a "coon show," though nothing in the script indicates that the spirit of the play has been violated. As a slice-of-life playwright, Bullins carves out zesty evocations of drunken parties, card-playing cronies, the sudden sensual thrust and parry of the sexes. When he can carve out the palpitating hearts...