Word: playwrightes
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...playwright knows that the most difficult part of play writing is to prevent the last act from falling flat. After traveling through the first two acts at a fast pace, it is hard to hold that pace until the end. Moreover, if the first two acts are well constructed, they should force a fairly inevitable conclusion. With a public like the American people, fed from its infancy on news, it is difficult to inspire interest in the inevitable...
...modern mystery vein of underworld plays, the only mystery being why the producers, after having bought the play for its previous standing and exploitation value, changed the name. The only explanation is that paradoxical titles are now in vogue on the screen, following the example of Playwright Shipman on the stage. Shipman might have written this cinema of the master thief's daughter who met the wealthy young man she was to rob, and turned from grand larceny to the grand passion. It is a machine-made picture, and Dorothy Dalton as Leah is only an effigy pulled around...
...husband is a playwright, the wife an actress, and so far their marrriage has begotten only temperament. O'Neill shows them snarling and yapping, making quarrels their chief recreation. They bicker about nothing, repetitiously, inconclusively, murderously, amorously. For they actually wrangle because they love each other too much to leave each other alone...
Inasmuch as a playwright and an actress are not features of every home, no universal implication can be drawn from O'Neill's forceful yoking of two creatures so wildly attuned and so woefully apart. Despite the everyday naturalness of his domestic shambles, he makes out no general case for marriage as a vise and a vice. Plentifully in evidence is his instinctive plumbing of the human heart, and his flair for real talk in copious draughts. But the searchlight of his realism throws up figures that are drab instead of highly colored. Jacob Ben Ami rather luxuriates...
...Playwright Zangwill tries almost forcibly to be fair. He admits the young must indulge their craving for self-expression, while the old should give more pats on the head and fewer raps on the knuckle. But it is obvious that he really bows before Kipling's God of Things as They Are. It is Zangwill determined to grow old gracefully. He is intent on raising the dust by thumping sofa cushions which have already had the stuffing knocked out of them by numerous writers. His stodgy play is only occasionally relieved with flashes of wit, and sudden fits...