Word: playwrighting
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These nine plays spanning seven hours -- and two centuries -- aspire to nothing less than a history of America, mythic in scale yet humbly rooted in the evolving fate of the same few hundred acres of Kentucky. Playwright Robert Schenkkan proves a spectacularly vivid revisionist, underscoring the violence, exploitation, multiracial antagonism and unchecked injustice of our past. Produced at Seattle's Intiman Theater and Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum, this was the first Pulitzer Prize drama not seen in New York City and is thus a triumph for all regional theater...
...Liberals think it's about sexual harassment. Conservatives are sure it's about intellectual terrorism. Even Playbill splits the difference: half the front covers put a bull's-eye on the haughty college professor, the other half on his dim, dogmatic female student. Playwright David Mamet's off-Broadway zinger holds a mirror up to muddled modern life...
NOTHING MAKES AN OPERA MORE CLASsical than a mythological subject, and nothing makes it more modern than psychology. Playwright Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss) and composer Gerald Busby fuse the two in ORPHEUS IN LOVE, an off- Broadway retelling of the Orpheus legend -- mingling hints of Oedipus -- in which the characters are music teachers or pupils and hell is interwoven with high school. The sound, too, (by a string quartet, piano and two bassoons) - hovers between melodic-traditional and staccato-modern. Kirsten Sanderson's witty staging deftly evokes dreams -- their fleeting lyricism, transposed logic, sexual ambiguity and poignant blend...
...mistakes for a government investigator. The setting and some of the plot, however, came from an episode Sullivan heard about when serving on a National Endowment for the Arts theater panel: a beleaguered troupe, desperate to sustain its grant, offered to bribe an agency inspector who was also a playwright by pledging to produce his plays...
...unshowy performance as the celebrity writer Trigorin that subtly conveys the character's lonely, inward-looking obsession with his craft. As the actress Arkadina, Tyne Daly stresses monstrous self-absorption. Not for Daly the customary dotty unawareness of how she puts down her son, a would-be avant- garde playwright; each belittling gesture is calculated cruelty. As the son, Ethan Hawke solves the play's pivotal problem, foreshadowing the youth's instability and making clear why he and not his at-wit's-end beloved, Nina, commits suicide...