Word: playwright
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1950
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Early last fall a prominent literary critic was in Cambridge trying to interest the people over at Brittle Hall in producing a play he had just written. Nothing over came of it, and had the playwright not been named Edmund Wilson, the general public might have been spared such a preposterous serving of rag-tag dialectics as his "The Little Blue Light...
Repetition is a very difficult technique for a playwright to use; if employed too little, it seems like a series of trivial mistakes; if used too frequently, it is monotonous. Getrude Stein, however, is an artist at repetition--of words, of thoughts, of dramatic situations. In her play, "Yes Is For a Very Young Man," the obvious use of this technique is in the repeating of single words; in the first act, "yes" is exhausted of all its symbolic meaning in an excellent dialogue between Ferdinand, a young, confused French boy and Constance, a characterization of Gertrude Stein herself. There...
...Broadway, spring all too often wears a wintry look, and April is the crudest month indeed. Last week two plays, one French and one American, struggled to outdo each other in making their characters and their audiences groan. As the work of French Playwright Jean Anouilh (Antigone), Cry of the Peacock proved the more surprising debacle. Anouilh's indictment of Love began as frivolously as Molnar and wound up as savagely as Strindberg. With notable help from the production, the play messed up every mood it attempted, and, despite brief glimpses of something better, proved dated, hollow, inept. Bitterly...
Unlike Eliot, Playwright Fry writes to the heart more than to the head, with a controlled, compassionate irony that rates love above every other human emotion. Not only does he dare to be exuberantly romantic, he dares it in verse. And he dares to reach for timeless meanings rather than immediate credulities by making the time 1400, "either more or less or exactly," and the setting an ordinary English market town called Cool Clary...
...Lady's Not for Burning has wit and comic relief as well as heart, and it has declarations of love such as no living playwright has found the language for. When Thomas deprecatingly says of himself...