Word: johnstons
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...noted dramatist Denis Johnston concluded the Summer School's series of three drama lectures last Thursday night. Speaking in Allston Burr Hall, he gave his views on "The Dramatist in the Theatre." Johnston, currently professor of English at Mt. Holyoke, gained much of his theatrical experience at the Abbey Theatre in Ireland under the guiding genius of William Butler Yeats...
With a schorarly yet amusing manner, Johnston said, "The course of these lectures has proceeded from theocracy through aristocracy and democracy to chaos--the actor being God, the director king, the writer everybody, and chaos TV. The writer plays the second most universal pastime of Western man, for everybody has ideas for or thinks he is capable of writing a play...
...Also, audience reaction causes revision of plays." Audience comments, however, are as a rule not good, Johnston finds. "If I do exactly the opposite of what I am told, the play will be successful...
...author is usually the first person to adopt a realistic attitude toward theatre, and this is the reason that theatre groups run by writers tend to last longer than any other type of theatre organization." Among theatres formerly or presently run by writers, Johnston cited the Abbey Theatre, the Provincetown Play-house, and the Poets' Theatre here in Cambridge...
...sure: South Carolina's Strom Thurmond, hero of the Dixiecrat uprising in the Democratic Party in 1948, suggested that they march in a body down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House to see Eisenhower and tell him they would not back down; his stalemate Olin ("the Solon") Johnston had a 40-hour speech ready for one of the biggest filibusters of all time. Calmly Russell argued Thurmond out of his proposal. He told Olin the Solon to keep his speech handy, just in case. Then Virginia's Harry Byrd summed up the sense of the meeting. "Dick...