Word: playwrighting
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Theater is, at heart, just people in a big room trying to talk -- the characters with one another, the playwright with the audience...
...protest its disintegration, Vaclav Havel is a President once more. Elected to a five-year term by the parliament of the four-week-old Czech Republic, Havel will preside from the same office in Prague's Hradcany Castle over about two-thirds of his former country. The onetime playwright and erstwhile communist-era dissident promised to maintain a "moral dimension" in his government and to serve as a "more experienced and wiser" statesman in promoting accord with his nation's new neighbor, Slovakia...
...Andes plane crash that forced its surviving passengers to cannibalism: early on, the movie has a great avalanche. After that, it's all downhill. The acting (Ethan Hawke and Vincent Spano are the stars) starts at a pitch of whiny hysteria and rarely lets up. The dialogue, by ace playwright John Patrick Shanley, sounds as if poorly translated from the Spanish: "What have we done that God now asks us to eat the bodies of our own dead friends?" Dissing aside, that makes for a poignant ethical dilemma and a telling religious metaphor. But Alive strands its theme of haunted...
...characters seem only minimally self-aware, so their big speeches and dramatic moments sound shoehorned into their mouths. Director Tazewell Thompson's lugubrious pace doesn't help. But the basic idea is exciting enough that the play deserves to be seen. If the playwright digs deeper into these people -- what in them feels American, what feels African and what seems caught in a limbo between -- a future production may justify great expectations...
THAT IS THE QUESTION: TO BE OR not . . . to bop. The problem, first stated by an English playwright of some note, was rephrased and repunctuated by John Birks Gillespie in 1979 and used as the title of a free-swinging memoir. To Be or Not . . . to Bop: hip, funny, silly, fractured, rhythmic -- each word is like a snap of the fingers -- pointed, pertinent, dizzy. Very Dizzy...