Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...actress Mary Astor was involved in a messy divorce case, with her husband publishing parts of her diary that described bedroom details of her affair with playwright and director George S. Kaufman. (She had breathlessly described Kaufman's "incredible powers of recuperation" - back then, even sex scandals had a touch of literary elegance.) Sam Goldwyn, who had his own studio, stood by Astor and allowed her to return to the film she had been making, the immortal Dodsworth. Her career continued for another quarter century, though she now played women with a darker allure, like Bogart's femme fatale...
...Arthur Miller had put the point smartly in the late 60s: "After all the legal, moral and psychological arguments are done," the playwright wrote, "the fact remains that a man is going to prison for publishing and advertising stuff a few years ago that today would hardly raise an eyebrow in your dentist's office. This is the folly, the menace of all censorship - it lays down rules for all time which are ludicrous a short time later...
...straw hat and Dame Edna glasses; a bronzed, bare-chested father holding his knee; their son dressed in a tropical shirt squinting at the sun. The latter is Michael Gow aged 6, holidaying near Ulladulla on the New South Wales south coast, though that's about all the Australian playwright can remember. "In my memory, Christmas holidays went from about 1959 to 1970," recalls Gow, 51. "There's just this kind of weird dream...
...play about death," he explains. "And how you deal with that shows how you value life, I guess." Putting his family snapshot on the poster and program accompanying Away's current national tour (which runs until October) also acknowledges how much the play is about the playwright. "It was a turning-30 play," Gow says, "so it was very much: Where am I from? Who am I? How did I get to be this? It all ended up in that play...
...playwright since, Gow has never sought to recapture the butterfly spirit of Away. "I have a short attention span," he says. Instead he wrote the stage equivalent of a fingers-up sign to the Australian Bicentennial with 1841, took an Edward Albee-esque look at modern marriage in Sweet Phoebe (in which Cate Blanchett made her British stage debut) and, most recently, had actors perform The Iliad in underpants (Live Acts on Stage). But it is as a director that Gow is now making his mark. As artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company since 1999, he has energetically championed...