Word: playwright
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1950
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Louisiana as in Russia the play concerns a dying class of charming, weak, self indulgent aristocrats who stubbornly refuse to face reality, and the emerging power of plebeian gogetters. Playwright Logan's most vivid achievement is atmospheric: with Negro servants and songs, with Jo Mielziner's handsome set and Lucinda Ballard's elegant costumes, The Wisteria Trees has its own strong sense of period and place. And in Louisiana as in Russia, the family will not sell off some of the land they love in order to survive, so that in the end their plantation goes under...
...Playwright Logan's Lucy Andree Rans-dall is turned into a rather more aware heroine, and amorously lost lady, than Chekhov's Madame Ranevskaya. Helen Hayes plays the part with resourcefulness and brightness, and serves (more than anything in the play) as a kind of handrail through the evening. For Logan has not learned Chekhov's trick of creating drama by evading it, has not his ability to seem at once compassionate and inexorable...
...truth is that Playwright Logan has infused a touch of Yancy Loper into Chekhov, and what is heard at the end is the sound of the ax hacking the heart out of The Cherry Orchard. Yet the real trouble with The Wisteria Trees is not that it falls short of Chekhov, but that on its own terms it is so frequently blurred and limp...
London still waited eagerly for T.S. Eliot's verse play, The Cocktail Party, now in its tenth sold-out week on Broadway. Meanwhile, it was busy doing homage to a meteoric new playwright, who, like Eliot, had turned the trick of making poetic drama a sizzling box-office hit. A year ago, few even in London literary circles had heard of Christopher Fry. Last week the name was marquee magic that packed two theaters with customers of all brow heights. The plays: Fry's Venus Observed, produced, directed and acted by Sir Laurence Olivier...
...Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas, Playwright Robert Sherwood, Historian Carl Van Doren, Commentator Raymond Swing, and Cass Canfield, chairman of the board of Harper's, which published Streit's book...