Word: schisgal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Tiger and The Typists are a pair of one-act, two-character plays by Murray Schisgal, 36, who is handsomely helped by the husband-and-wife acting team of Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. In The Tiger, an eccentrically violent postman named Ben grabs Gloria, a Long Island housewife, from a New York street, marches her captive to his cold-water lair, and pins her arms behind her. Rape? Murder? What is on the whirling mind of this kook? His room is a chaotic rubble of exposed steampipes, drying clothes, books spilling out of bureau drawers, and a blackboard chalked...
...Gloria to strip to her red-and-blue-flowered slip, and collects kisses on demand, he begins talking the poor girl to death on the subject of the death of the individual. His mission, he proclaims, is to be a brutal predator in this world of sheep. Then Playwright Schisgal tips his plot upside down like an hourglass. Shortly, Gloria is chatterboxing Ben's ears with lists of suburban conformities: pulling crabgrass, going bowling, bed-hopping around. While they prate of the lack of communication among moderns, each spills a major grievance. Gloria's husband is an unread...
...best efforts, while Broadway is often cavalierly measured by its worst. The present crisis of off-Broadway is that its best efforts are becoming rarer and rarer, and it is being swamped by its typical products, which are increasingly venal, sloppy, and predictable. For every promising Playwright Schisgal, there are a dozen silly spoofs of old movie musicals, or tasteless tours through neurotic junkyards of the mind, or criminal displays of self-ordained talent that might have lasted ten seconds before getting the critical gong on the late Major Bowes's Amateur Hour. Off-Broadway is frittering away...