Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...twelfth novel, British Author and Playwright Fay Weldon has taken a giddy leap back to the fiction style of the 19th century. Enough of angst and ambiguity, of literary experiment. Bring on Trollope's nudging narrator and Dickens' moral confidence. The Hearts and Lives of Men -- surely a Victorian novelist would have come up with a livelier title -- is nonetheless set in modern times, specifically the fast-track London art world of the '60s and '70s. It covers 23 years in the lives of Clifford and Helen Wexford, an attractive, careless pair who marry, remarry, have messy affairs, manage...
...with the tendentious alarmism of the 1960s and with more recent, ham-fisted TV mega- epics such as World War III and The Day After. It is hard to see how any narrative on the subject could avoid being either dogged and dull or archly ironic and malicious. But Playwright Lee Blessing has brought it off. His A Walk in the Woods is a work of passion and power with the ring of political truth. It is not only the best of the few dramas to reach Broadway this season, it is also the funniest comedy...
PLENTY must have been a difficult play to produce, especially for a college group. It tolerates nothing short of perfection from the actors and the director. Playwright David Hare has nothing but contempt for such mundane matters as coherence or chronology. The play demands complete attention from the audience at all times. But it's an absorbing and challenging play, and the Dunster production rescues it from a potential mire of complications and communicates its full, disturbing potential in the miniscule Junior Common Room...
...didn't sleep through the English 10 lecture on Restoration comedies, you may remember that William Congreve was a successful and respected playwright until his play The Way of the World failed miserably, and he retired from the stage in shame and defeat. If you watch the North House production of World, you will understand...
...what he regarded as the "travesty" of the New York production, the more phlegmatic Rice was content to let it run its course and enjoy the success. A few months later, when Rice dropped out of a treatment of P.G. Wodehouse's unflappable butler, Jeeves, Lloyd Webber enlisted Playwright Alan Ayckbourn and put the show on the boards in Bristol. It eventually closed in London after 47 performances -- a failure that continues to rankle the fierce perfectionist...