Word: drama
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...interests of bigger and better drama Will Robinson '43 had to have most of his hair shaved off so he would look his part, and, for the same reason, Richard Wiechman '43 has been letting his hair grow for weeks...
Fledgling (by Eleanor Carroll Chilton & Philip Lewis, produced by Otis Chatfield-Taylor). One of the hardest things in the drama is to make the fires of a purely interior, mental hell apparent to an audience. Usually only the greatest playwrights, the Ibsens and Chekhovs, can do it. Fledgling, adapted from Authoress Chilton's novel Follow the Furies, does it, though it is hardly a great play. It also does other, much less admirable things-confuses its central tragedy with subplots and religious argument in the manner of old-fashioned "problem plays." But the hell remains visible, registers hard...
Many Manhattan critics, fixing on the intermittent "problem-play" tone of the drama, wrote of it with patronizing witticisms. An exception was the Post's sensitive, scholarly John Mason Brown, who gave Fledgling one of the longest play reviews of the season, said: "It treats playgoers as grownups and the theatre as an adult institution...
...Corn Is Green (by Emlyn Williams, produced by Herman Shumlin) joins a good sound sentimental play with just the actress for the job: Ethel Barrymore. Although its young Welsh author is best known in the U. S. for his murder drama Night Must Fall, this is no story of a psychopathic killer. It is a warm, wise semi-autobiography. It ran for nearly 700 performances in London, many during the blackout...
...Figaro, of course, in its original form was Beaumarchais' virulent satire on the French nobility.' If Da Ponte, Mozart's incompetent librettist, had not emasculated Beaumarchais' play of all its social satire, until it was nothing but lace and frills, we might have a more cogent piece of drama. Even as it is, Mozart's score is so wonderfully expressive and dramatic that of itself it creates vital characters where there are nothing but wooden-heads in the libretto...