Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Cockfighting is quite violent and - for lack of a better word - Osbournesque, as in shockrocker Ozzy Osbourn, not the playwright John Osborne. The first time I saw a gallero stick the bloody head of a wounded rooster in his mouth, suck on it like a popsicle, and then spit out a thick stream of chicken blood, I thought the combination of beer and sun was playing feverish games with my head. Across the arena I saw my friend Jon's face, and he had the same open-mouth-lost-gringo expression that I imagined my face was showing...
...playwright John Patrick Shanley’s own words, “Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind. ‘Doubt’ is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present.” That’s a tall order for any play, particularly one that clocks in at about an hour and a half. So it feels odd to say that “Doubt” should be tighter, quicker, faster-paced–anything to wake up the play?...
...Stasi--East Germany's internal spy network--is in full fester, keeping watch on artists and political dissidents, forcing many into obeisance or jail, silence or suicide. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mhe), a mousy Stasi captain, plants bugs in the home of chic playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Wiesler and his coarser superiors have motives as complex as they are nasty: to please a party boss, to tease out scenarios of voyeuristic lust and, well, because they can. Wiesler has another reason to spy and pry: he's good...
...craftsman, Neil Simon may finally come to be regarded as an artist. Says John Randolph, who plays Simon's grandfather in Broadway Bound: "It was classic, that opening night in Washington. He spent all these years waiting for some critic to recognize that he is a major, important, serious playwright, which this play proves. And as soon as he had a copy of a review saying that, he was absolutely overcome...
...audiences who come to the theater for feeling rather than anesthesia, for honesty rather than comfort, Broadway Bound should firmly establish Simon's standing in the top rank of American playwrights. He does not attempt to do what Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard have done: create their own worlds and mesmerize viewers into them. Simon evokes a world very much like the viewers' own and entices them into confronting their own feelings. Broadway Bound is the work of a master craftsman, at once literary and heartfelt, shaped with becoming modesty. It is unmistakably urban and Jewish...