Word: playwrightes
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Christopher Durang '71 is a playwright of extremes. His plays and musicals combine sophisticated literary allusion and bawdy sexual humor. He parodizes and satirizes such revered institutions as religion, the family, and the literary canon. According to Durang, the only rule in writing is "whatever you write about, you must have a strong reaction to it." Ironically, the one institution Durang seems to have no strong opinion about is his alma mater--Harvard...
Christopher Hampton, the playwright who wrote and directed Carrington, obviously believes it was the former. Yet his account of the relationship between the half-forgotten painter and the homosexual who turned biography into a modernist art form is distant and gingerly, respectful and respectable. Reason tells us that there must have been something more needy and smothering in her nature, something more grasping and careless in his, than Hampton shows us. After all, Dora did marry a handsome youth not because she was smitten with him but because Lytton was. Yet their menage a trois is presented blandly...
...remain downstage as, behind them, the son sits at his mother's bedside. He remains mute the entire time, allowing the focus to stay on the three voices of this one woman. In reality, though, this son is Albee and the three voices are his, the voice of the playwright. At last, the son is in control of his mother's fate. The result is a brilliant and sensitive play, superbly presented in the current production. All theater buffs are urged to go see Three Tall Women, a highlight of recent theater...
...playwright who presumes to team Picasso with Einstein makes an implicit contract with the theatergoer: I'm going to provide intellectual pyrotechnics. As the two engage in their battle of wits, however, the drama begins to feel like a play of ideas without enough ideas. Picasso's one-liners aren't so much fireworks as kitchen matches. Martin has recklessly ventured into the country of Tom Stoppard, whose amazing Travesties (which convenes Lenin and James Joyce in Switzerland) may be seen as a rich ancestor of this poor relation...
...FAIR LADY: Playwright George Bernard Shaw's clearheaded comedy Pygmalion (1913) ends with Eliza Doolittle leaving her mentor Henry Higgins to pursue a life of her own. To stymie efforts to tag on a happy ending, Shaw went so far as to write an afterword in which he married off Eliza to the foppish Freddy Hill. But Shaw's efforts were in vain: the wildly popular musical version, staged in 1956, six years after his death, ends with the unmistakably romantic reconciliation that audiences had secretly been hoping for for half a century...