Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ever a project looked doomed, it was this one. Hair's source, the 1968 Broadway hit, was a largely plotless, if tuneful, show that homogenized the '60s for theater audiences; even at the time, it was dated. The movie's creators -Czech-born Director Milos Forman, Playwright Michael Weller, Choreographer Twyla Tharp-have never previously negotiated the perilous tides of movie musicals. Add a largely unproven cast and a grand budget, and you can see just how hairy an undertaking this movie was. One false move, and Hair would have congealed into Grease...
Tremblay handles the cross currents with piercing dialogue, black and witty one moment and poignant the next. The playwright skillfully anchors his themes in specific references to the trials of French-Canadians in Anglo-dominated Canada...
Berg's libretto, brilliantly compressed by the composer from two works by the German playwright Frank Wedekind, fared less well, and therein lay the perplexity. The production was staged by French Director Patrice Chéreau, 34, who has built a controversial career on the apparent principle that anything worth doing is worth doing outrageously. His avant-garde Ring cycle for the 1976 Bayreuth Festival drew boos and hisses as well as cheers, and is still hotly debated inter nationally by Wagnerians...
...searing anatomy of pain is charted by Playwright Olwen Wymark, an American woman who lives in England, in Find Me, a drama about a disturbed young girl and her progressive deterioration at the hands of bureaucratic bumblers. While the key role is shared, Lisa Goodman is most affecting in suggesting the child's agony. In a totally different vein, suicide, adultery and attempted murder become almost folksy episodes in Crimes of the Heart. Playwright Beth Henley spins out a web of relationships among three Mississippi sisters, and, though the actresses (Kathy Bates, Susan Kingsley and Lee Anne Fahey...
...power of Simon's writing and Orbach's acting help the play transcend its excessive length and half its cast. Chapter Two is not a funny play; it is a fundamentally somber play with some funny lines. The man so often heralded as America's greatest comic playwright has now chosen not to make us laugh at human pain this time. With Chapter Two, Simon puts the hurts people inflict on each other center-stage, instead of allowing us an indirect glimpse through snappy one-liners...