Word: playwrighting
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Some performances are exceptionally good. Sheila Hart's Penny Sycamore, the zany lady who becomes a playwright because a typewriter was mistakenly delivered to her address, is brilliantly performed: she has assimilated the character so well that her dialogue does not exist as lines, a guile-lessness making at once for high comedy and fine acting. Llody Schwartz's Kolenkhov is a natural scene-stealer. He pronounces "The Monte Carlo Ballet" with just the right Bela Lugosi intonation, he talks and gestures like a proud Rasputin fallen on bad times, and his Romanov leer is so hilariously Russian that...
...nudes are graceful, handsome and refreshingly unselfconscious. Acting skill is secondary in group enterprises of this sort, but Jeffrey Herman is kinkily personable and quite funny as a gay Jew, and Madeleine le Roux plays a tall blonde lesbian with the icy authority of a lady storm trooper. Playwright Tom Eyen is perhaps the best guide to the underlying seriousness that animates his play even at its silliest and most scandalous: "We're getting the new sexual freedom suddenly, and we don't know how to cope with it, which is a big pollution in itself...
South African Playwright Athol Fugard should bless his actors for breathing vitality into his stillborn script. James Earl Jones pours out his rage at existence like a volcanic river of fire, and Ruby Dee's face is one of those relief maps of pain, torment and humiliation that characterize a life when it is brutal, nasty and interminable. The pair ought to get a bonus in salvage...
...decent minister of the gospel of peace; but when the hour of trial came to me, I found that it was my destiny to be a man of action, and that my place was amid the thunder of the captains and the shouting." With typically Shavian irony, the playwright has turned things topsy-turvy in this work...
WHEN AN Irish-American playwright with a tragic soul begins to write comedy, the result is likely to be sentimenality of the worst sort. Ah, Wilderness is that type of play, fare fit for George M. Cohan, perhaps, but hardly the most relevant thing for a post-Beckett audience...