Word: playwrights
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...Ohio State Murders, one of the most famous works by acclaimed playwright and Harvard visiting professor Adrienne Kennedy, is ostensibly a play about violence. "I was asked to talk about the bloody imagery in my work," says Denise Nicholas at the start of the performance, playing a famous writer returning to give a lecture at her alma mater. "Bloodied heads, severed limbs, dead father, dead Nazis, dying Jesus." But those audience members looking for a shocking array of violence and defacement, a visual testament to the horrors of American racism which the play so brilliantly confronts, will have to look...
...extreme example of a call for authorial authority but not an abnormal one. The Dramatists Guild, the only national union of dramatic writers, encourages its members to stipulate a strict adherence to stage directions whenever they sign a contract for a new production. And more than one major playwright in recent memory has disavowed connection to a particular performance because of a disregard for their written directions, Robert Anderson's criticisms of the London run of his famous Tea and Sympathy being among the most notable...
...Ionesco's stage directions indicate, or does she keep her mouth closed and merely toss the socks as in Nicolas Bataille's original Paris production?) is a question about the seat of power in theatrical productions-and ultimately a question about the very nature of theater. Does the playwright, as the creator of the story being told, have the first and last word over how that story is to be staged? Or does that power fall to the director, the man or woman who is to bring the playwright's story to life? Is the theater a cousin of literature...
...This playwright-director dialectic may in fact be fundamental to the nature of modern theater as an artform which focuses on the depiction of conflict. But that hardly stops theater practitioners from debating the issue. And, unfortunately, the contentions about personal priviledge so often heard in this debate would seem to do more harm than good for all involved. "A production belongs to its director," I've been told. "He or she has the right to make whatever changes are necessary to create a unified vision." Or from the other side of the battlefield: "Only the playwright really knows...
...more interesting approach can be found in some of theater's most famous theoretical literature. French playwright and critic Antonin Artaud argues in his seminal work The Theater and its Double that the theater has too long been dominated by text, the director has too long been slave to the author. Theater is not literature, he argues, and it should not pay undue homage to the authority of written words. Theater is a unique set of experiences based fundamentally in space rather than letters. As such it has a visual language all its own, a language which cannot be notated...