Word: playwrighting
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Literal and literary insularity are not easy to achieve in New York City, but Playwright Paul Zindel has done it. He has lived, written and worked as a high school chemistry teacher on the city's lightly populated borough in the bay, Staten Island. Until last week: with a Pulitzer Prize* as a letter of recommendation, and with the pride of bachelorhood as impetus, he boarded a ferry and moved to Manhattan...
...since he won his prize in 1967 has displeased most reviewers. Says Zindel: "Albee is an example of what happens when one receives a prize and spends too much time shopping for antiques and wallpapering one's bathroom with velour. He's also an example of a playwright who doesn't listen to those who can give him objectivity...
Died. Helene Weigel, 70, Vienna-born actress-director and flinty widow of Playwright Bertolt Brecht; in East Berlin. Already an accomplished performer when she married Brecht in 1929, Weigel later starred in his drama Mother Courage on the Berlin stage. Anti-Nazi and proCommunist, the couple fled Hitler's Germany in 1933, lived in Denmark and the U.S., then returned to East Germany after the war. For the past 15 years Weigel directed the famed Berliner Ensemble, the repertory company founded by Brecht. "What Brecht prescribed," wrote Critic Kenneth Tynan in 1961, "his widow embodies: the maxim that there...
...Anything You Say Will Be Twisted, by British playwright Ken Campbell, is a perfect vehicle for the Senelick style. It is one of a long series of plays and novels, among them Gay's Beggar's Opera, derived from the life of Jack Sheppard, a young thief and ruffian of early 18-century London who became a folk hero through the British love of the scurrilous and inane. This particular version of the Sheppard legend has the hero start out as a relatively innocent carpenter's apprentice and slowly immerse himself in the ways of thievetry, lechery, and general debauchery...
...used to concoct the tantalizing puzzles on the back pages of New York magazine.) Thanks to the theatrical interests of his mother, an interior decorator known to friends as "Foxy," Stephen easily became a social caterpillar on the Manhattan show-biz party circuit. At one affair he met Playwright Arthur Laurents, who was reworking Romeo and Juliet in modern dress. Lenny Bernstein was doing the music, said Laurents. The lyricist? There was none at present...