Word: saroyans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
RAZZLE DAZZLE-William Saroyan- Harcourf, Brace...
...preface to one of these 16 short plays William Saroyan compares himself to George Bernard Shaw. The comparison is not altogether presumptuous. He shares with Shaw a fearless, sassy gaiety, and like Shaw he holds naturalism, heavyminded-ness and the theater in general in contempt. Both, in Saroyan's words, believe that the theater "all theater-should be fun. . . ." Whatever else they are, these plays and prefaces...
...plays are a bright, shifty blend of parable, poem, ballet, vaudeville, dream and relaxed ad-libbing. At their worst they contain, as Saroyan confesses, "careless and cheap feelings . . . cleverness and petty bitterness, spoofing and kidding, vulgarity here and there perhaps. . . ." At their best they meet Saroyan's requirements for art: "The surprise of art is not shock, but wonder. . . . The excitement it creates is not that of fear or loathing or irritation, but the excitement of revelation, understanding, love, and delight." Now & then Saroyan's spontaneity has the revelatory abruptness of a magnesium flare...
Among the books included in the exhibition are the best sellers: "The Epicure in Imperial Russia," "The White Cliffs," "The Flowering of New England," and "Saroyan's Fables." However, the literary content of the books was considered only as it related to the problems of typographic design and production...
...playwriting is the better, for several years. It is a stimulating discussion but unlikely to affect, the trend of play-writing. There is a place for both the vers libre and the mechanical playwrights. Lillian Hellman's "Watch on the Rhine" is as moving a play as any by Saroyan, whether or not we are conscious of her careful plot manipulation. Tchekov realized that form or the lack of form is not everything when he has Treplev, in the last act of "The Sea-Gull," say, "I come more and more to the conviction that it is not a question...