Word: playwright
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...life from an armchair, declared Playwright Thornton (The Skin of Our Teeth) Wilder, at Harvard for a few lectures. "I want to be exposed to the full shock-and-countershock of life. I don't want to be spared or saved from anyone or anything...
...over half a century, the Western theater has been dominated by the coldly paternal influence of the great Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg-social conscience and psychological drama. This dramatic realism swept the charming Victorian puppets off the stage and replaced them with disagreeable people; it produced excellent playwrights and at least one genius-Shaw. For the paper cutouts of Victorianism it substituted newspaper cutouts, transformed the stage into a lecture platform and the playwright into an amateur reporter, reformer and psychiatrist. The few English-speaking playwrights who attempted metrical dramas usually produced verse as feeble as Maxwell Anderson...
Over & above the echoes, what does Fry say? Little or nothing, say some of his critics. Says a fellow playwright: Fry has simply found "new ways to express old trivialities." Fry's chosen topics are not social problems. They are perhaps much smaller, perhaps much larger. He writes about the love life of a middle-aged duke (A.D. 1950); about the budding of Christianity from tiny scattered seeds in pagan England (A.D. 596); about Moses in Egypt...
...trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die." Before the next dawn, George Bernard Shaw had lapsed into final unconsciousness. A little over 24 hours later, the 94-year-old philosopher, playwright, professional pixie and self-styled "Bishop of Everywhere" was dead...
Died. George Bernard Shaw, 94, genius, playwright, wit, critic, Irishman, unsocial Socialist; of complications following a fall; in Ayot St. Lawrence, England...