Word: playwrights
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...David Mamet has a collection of essays called Writing in Cafés, or something like that. He says that the ideal venue for a playwright is to write radio plays, because then you have nothing, just--this is what somebody said. That's it. You have nothing to fall back on. That's quite interesting. Plays are hard, and I suspect that a lot of people who write plays don't really know how it's going to play. I mean, how do you know? Like some years ago, my wife and I went to see Ralph Fiennes do Hamlet...
...Shaffer was a kindred spirit to Mankiewicz: a cunning wordsmith with a playwright brother; his identical twin, Peter, wrote Equus and Amadeus. Like Mankiewicz (and Pinter, for that matter), Shaffer was fascinated by the ability of language to reveal, conceal and distort the workings of a person's mind and desires. In Sleuth he created a Chinese-box plot that on the surface was a very theatrical mystery, but at heart was a parable of sexual envy and English class hatred. Again, right up Pinter's dark alley...
...hope of English-speaking theater - "the new Olivier," critics said - and who had one-upped Olivier by directing and starring in an acclaimed film of Shakespeare's Henry V while still in his 20s. The new script for Sleuth is by Harold Pinter, the most demanding and honored playwright of the past half-century. Pinter, after all, did win the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature; and at 77, this imperious Brit is surely beyond the worry of writing scripts for 14-year-old American boys. So his criminal botch of the job can't be attributed to marketplace timidity...
...Mankiewicz and the urban sophisticates he wrote about, words were swords in the duel of wits. He thought of himself as a screen playwright, and Hollywood as Broadway West: films were theater in closeup. (Academy voters apparently agreed with Mankiewicz: they named him best director as well as best writer for Three Wives and Eve.) No question, he loved the sound of his own authorial voice; it had an overripe eloquence that could beguile any viewer-listener. And when he turned plays into films - producing Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story or directing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar - he could fall...
...addition to all the other distinctive features of the evening, playwright Arthur L. Kopit ’59 will be in attendance on opening night to participate in a post-show discussion of his work. Priour maintains that his level of excitement is almost indescribable...