Word: playwrights
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Shepard, premier playwright and matinee idol, fits the cowpoke boots just fine, but he is too snaky and controlled to play a tortured loser. Basinger remains an in-joke of Hollywood casting directors; 46 other American actresses could have made some emotional sense out of May, or at least sent her smoldering in mystery. Stanton, with his haunted, pinched face and chirruping alibis, steals the show--or, rather, is awarded it by default. And Randy Quaid, as a gentleman caller, is a perfect audience surrogate: decent, dogged, perplexed by a family squabble that admits no strangers to its terrible embrace...
...park bench, one white and one black, sit swapping stories. No premise could be simpler, no setting more static. But because the theater is ultimately a medium of language, of narrative, a skilled playwright can find in just such a conversation all the action an audience needs. The result can be poignant and elegiac, like David Storey's Home, or salty and burlesque, like David Mamet's Duck Variations, or full of rage and silences, like many of Beckett's dramas...
Like War of the Worlds, Orson Welles' famous 1938 radio ruse that convinced thousands of Americans that Martians had invaded New Jersey, the 2½-hour Finnish program was out-and-out fiction, adapted from U.S. Playwright Jan Hartman's prizewinning play The Next War. Despite several on-air warnings, the Finnish broadcast sparked hours of panic, during which emergency telephone lines were jammed. "I really thought war had come," said Helsinki Engineer Matti Korponen. Mirjam Polkunen, head of theatrical broadcasting for Radio Finland, promised no such "documentaries" would ever again be aired. Said she: "We didn't mean to scare...
Still, there is something discomfiting about Stuff Happens. In a docudrama, it is always the second half of the neologism that makes us queasy. Hare is a supremely self-confident playwright. His dramatic inventions--of private conversations, of motivational hints--are always plausible. And applaudable, if you are, like this reviewer, skeptical of the Iraq war effort. But they are, of course, historically unreliable. For Hare is a British twit of the tiresomely superior leftist kind. We have no doubt that if he, instead of Blair, had been Prime Minister, he would have stood up more manfully to the Bushies...
...Complicite. "I'm very reticent talking about those kind of things," she says. Instead, "where my parents and my sister are - that is where home is," she says. To this beloved harbor, she'd like to bring back a film project - perhaps Sisters, which she is developing with Sydney playwright Stephen Sewell. Or even an Australian episode of The 4400 (franchise-friendly, the returnees are from all round the world). "And I've already cast it," she says with a Jude-like cackle. "I've got all my mates in it. It's a cast of thousands, let me tell...