Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When she was 14 Litt "just kind of decided to write a play." Completed when she was 16, the play, Epiphany, won the Young Playwright's Festival run by the Circle in the Square Repertory Theater in New York City...
WHEN IT CAME to raping and pillaging the works of others, no 20th-century playwright could hold a candle to Bertolt Brecht. The idiosyncratic pinko playwright ranged far and wide in his search for material to transform into his own dramas. He rivaled Shakespeare, the literary grave-robber supreme, in his audacious choice of sources. Twenties cinema, 18th century musicals, Renaissance history, Jack London stories; in Brecht's hands they all became the stuff of his proletarian "epic" theater...
...epic play, setting works in an unfamiliar and unsympathetic context allows the audience to absorb the message of the works rather than getting absorbed in the character and stories. If Andrei Serban's seminew production of Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan shows anything, it's that a playwright's intentions can be taken far beyond the level of good taste and still work as great theater. Assuming of course, that your idea of great theater is irony applied with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer...
...film obliquely raises questions of art and society, but at its heart, Prick Up Your Ears is the story of two intriguing men and their problematic relations. The brilliant performances by Gary Oldman as the randy playwright and Alfred Molina as the whining Halliwell necessarily make the film, because Bennett and Frears have all but ignored the charged times in which the Orton story unfolded. Although painstaking detail masterfully recreates the setting of the story, the filmmakers have largely eschewed an attempt to depict the explosive social scene of 1960s London...
...Sloane, Loot and What the Butler Saw. Through shock, Orton sought to shake up British society. We are given a hint of the stuffy British upbringing Orton received, but too little a taste of Orton's literary product. A snatch of dialogue here or there doesn't convey the playwright's reputed genius. We have to take his word...