Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After dabbling in student journalism and instrumental music, but never acting, Hwang conceived the notion that he was meant to be a playwright. His first work for the stage portrayed a musician asserting his own divinity. What the author remembers most about it is a professor's remark that he plainly knew nothing about creating plays. Undaunted, Hwang succeeded beyond an undergraduate's wildest fantasy with his next try, F.O.B., a reflection on the immigrant experience. Just over a year after the show was staged in his college dorm, it was performed at New York City's pre-eminent...
Where does Dustin Hoffman, Hollywood's hottest leading actor, go to try his hand at Shakespeare? Where does composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who has had six megamusicals on Broadway in the '80s, launch his latest? Where does American playwright Martin Sherman (Bent) debut a work about his countrymen in exile...
...Playwright Sherman, who has not made much of a splash in the decade since Bent, provides in A Madhouse in Goa the best new play of a fecund London year that has already brought new efforts from half-a-dozen top dramatists. Structurally, Sherman's show is two one-acts, but they are linked by one of the cleverest devices in memory. The first piece, A Table for a King, is an exquisitely painful tale of betrayals involving a pathetically dignified Mississippi matron, a sweetly awkward American college boy recovering from a thwarted homosexual infatuation, a casually seductive waiter...
...West End is having its best season in years, with an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, Dustin Hoffman's debut in Shakespeare and a fine new work by American playwright Martin Sherman...
Where does an established playwright take new work to see it brought to life? Once the automatic answer was New York City, on Broadway or off. Now, for Pulitzer prizewinner Beth Henley, the starting place is Costa Mesa, Calif. For Emmy winner Luis Santeiro, it is Miami. For three-time Tony nominee Graciela Daniele, it is Philadelphia. And for Donald Freed, whose Circe and Bravo was a London success, it is Denver. Three of the Broadway season's major plays -- Eastern Standard, The Heidi Chronicles and Largely New York -- originated in Seattle, while Neil Simon's Rumors and A.R. Gurney...