Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Right You Are (If You Think You Are). Playwright Luigi Pirandello, like the Devil, seduces the idle. After years of temptation, the Theatre Guild succumbed last week to spending some unengaged time and talent on special matinees of a cerebral shadow dance wherein "the Italian Shakespeare" divides a flighty family against itself and lets in village gossips to decide who is crazy. There is no one crazy but someone's else thinking makes him so. The truth? What is truth? etc. etc. Two-thirds of it are lively entertainment, unless you think otherwise. Helen Westley does another...
...Certainly not hearty, round-bellied, wenching Sir Jeremy (Sydney Greenstreet) who engineered the titillating situation and kept the audience chuckling while he explained the young wife's earnest efforts, in the next room, to quicken the corpse. His double-meanings, the play's liveliest, are neatly turned. Playwright Dorranee Davis has woven an ancient habiliment for his modern comedy. Because it is not fish of the Restoration, fowl of the Jazz Age, or flesh of sound drama, it fritters off into neglibility...
...Significance. Foe of machinery, Professor Pirandello never tires of manipulating the intricate machinery of the human mind. Attacking cinema with the full venom of a legitimate playwright, he manipulates his customary close-ups and fadeouts of existence, real and unreal, seeming and serious. A mystic, a believer in man's supernatural endowment, he finds nothing too lowly, dull or grotesque to serve his purpose-a beggars' shelter, a dusty country road, a flyblown tavern. One who speculates on the borders of insanity, he never long departs from concrete dramatization. Shoot is as full of action as a wild...
...Davenport, Iowa, George W. Cannon, Jr., 14, high school student, admirer and correspondent of several actresses, wrote a long letter saying "to die will be a glorious adventure. ... It is my belief that my spirit will some day enter into the body of a playwright and will call forth the story of a boy who loved to dream, the story of a boy who was so disillusioned that he couldn't stand it any more," and inhaled illuminating...
...discovering that his wife (played by Florence Eldridge) had once been free. From then on, it is every man's wife for him. Naturally there was much to be said and suffered before a harassed audience could steal away on the first night without embarrassing the well-liked playwright...