Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What makes a playwright hot? An Academy Award nomination helps. Kenneth Lonergan has been churning out plays for years ("This Is Our Youth," "The Waverly Gallery") to mounting acclaim, but it was his screenplay for the Oscar contender "You Can Count on Me" that really put him on the map. I wish I could share in the enthusiasm for Lonergan's work. But his latest play, "Lobby Hero" (at Playwrights Horizons in New York City), shows off all his strengths and weaknesses, with the latter narrowly winning out once again...
...Martin McDonagh was once a hot playwright too, a few years back, when "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," the first of his Leenane trilogy, introduced this talented London-based playwright to America. Next came "The Lonesome West," but now that "A Skull in Connemara" has arrived (at off-Broadway's Gramercy Theater), the critics seem to have lost interest. True, McDonagh's mordant vision of rural Irish life is pretty familiar by now, and "Connemara" does not have the structural neatness or the tragic force of "Beauty Queen." But it has something that Lonergan's plays don't have...
...preface to 1888's Miss Julie, "are conglomerates of past and present cultural phases, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, pieces torn from fine clothes and become rags, patched together as is the human soul."Working with what vague theatrical advice the twisted Swedish Victorian playwright had to offer, the impressive vision for the production in the Loeb Experimental Theater's black box stage by director Austin Guest '04 ought to be commended. But effort isn't everything, and this mostly freshman production falls flat due to excess and suffers from the problems Strindberg hoped his warning could...
...Frank's dad. There's a smell of whiskey in the air and you're sure the bloke staring you in the face is telling you the biggest load of bollocks this side of Cork, but you can't help but listen. Conor McPherson, one of the hottest young playwrights to come out of Ireland in the last decade, has made a career on just this sort of intimate performance, the kind that exists nowhere but in theaters and establishments that serve alcohol. You certainly won't find it at the local tenplex. His biggest successes, like The Weir, have...
...mind games, of course, are old hat to anyone who has been paying attention to Pinter, Mamet or even Albee in his better days. But here's it's especially facile and inauthentic: The "power" this older couple has over the younger seems to be entirely manufactured by the playwright (could anyone but an old man have written this play?) rather than growing out of any psychological truth or reality...