Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...audience that feels most refreshed. This off-Broadway show--which opened at Manhattan's Second Stage Theatre in October and has been such a hit that it's planning a move to Broadway in February--is theater as primal as it is charming. Zimmerman likes to say the playwright and audience are "collaborating in a dream," and she has brought some of humanity's oldest dreams--Greek myths--to shimmering life...
DIED. GARDNER MCKAY, 69, TV heartthrob who left show business to become a successful playwright; of prostate cancer; in Oahu, Hawaii. When his South Seas series, Adventures in Paradise, ended in the early '60s, he turned down Marilyn Monroe's plea that he appear in her never finished film Something's Got to Give. After living in the Amazon, McKay wrote dozens of plays, including Sea Marks, and the well-received 1999 novel Toyer...
This hokey 1958 Broadway hit has justly languished in dinner theaters ever since. Now, in a radical revision at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum, playwright David Henry Hwang treats the original like "some kind of weird Oriental minstrel show," as one character puts it, and wraps its assimilationist anthems into a merry multicultural trip from Tiananmen Square to San Francisco's Chinatown. Director-choreographer Robert Longbottom adds a dollop of kitsch--and somehow the mix is funny and clever. It even jerks a tear or two. Broadway, get ready...
David Mamet has emerged as the most revered contemporary American playwright due to his ability to create a distinct language for his characters. Listen to the way the real estate salesmen talk about the “leads” in Glengarry Glenross or how Fox talks about setting up a meeting in Speed-the-Plow. The characters grasp at words as if they were life preservers, futilely attempting to keep their heads above water, eventually drowning in their desperation. To Mamet, the world is a cruel joke; some people are in on it and some aren?...
DIED. ANTHONY SHAFFER, 75, lawyer turned thriller writer; of a heart attack; in London. Shaffer, whose playwright brother Peter wrote Amadeus, was best known for Sleuth, a brilliant, twisted portrait of double crossing, manipulation and revenge that won a Tony in 1971 and was made into a film starring Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier...