Word: playwrighting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With this story and with countless others, Sam Behrman--playwright, author and raconteur--has amused and entertained his Kirkland House hosts this past week. His Evening with S.N. Behrman ("I feel like Beatrice Lillie") in the Junior Common Room Monday night, was the highlight of a "marvelous, but exhausting" week in Cambridge--a week of pre-dinner sherry, after-dinner brandy, and constant conversation...
...great fund of Behrman anecdotes may serve to obscure, in the minds of his listeners, his own considerable accomplishments as a playwright and journalist. Although much of his time has been devoted to the stage since the production of his first play, The Second Man, in 1927, he says, "What I really love to write is prose...
...based on a quotation from Lord Leighton, a British painter: "There is another man inside me, cynical, blase, critical." Behrman dramatized the story in three weeks while unemployed and casting about desperately for ideas; produced by the Theatre Guild, it was an overnight success, and Behrman has been a playwright ever since...
...London performance of The Second Man, Harold Laski introduced the playwright to a tremendously tall British lord ("He seemed interminable.") Sensing that the nobleman was not interested in the conversation, Laski said, "You know, Mr. Behrman wrote the play you're seeing tonight...
Behrman's favorite modern playwright is the late Frenchman Jean Giraudoux; Giraudoux's characters, he says, are "human beings of acute sensibility; they are not thugs or sadists, but suffering, cultured people." He does not find much value in the angry works of John Osborne or in the experimental theatre of Samuel Beckett. "Osborne is an arresting writer; he makes you listen to him, but his characters are monsters and have no awareness that they are monsters...