Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...Next Time might best be titled Weding for Waiting for Godot. Whereas in Beeken's master-piece we live through the plight of human beings waiting for that never-to-arrive something that will make sense of it all, in Saunders' play we merely hear the playwright's mouthpieces talk about waiting for that something. Beckett did not explain: he showed he dramatized. (There is a lot of truth to the old cliche that the silences are as important as any of the lines in Godot. ) Saunders merely feeds us truisms like "The point is that he existed...
NEXT TIME I'LL SING TO YOU is the non sequitur title of the James Saunders play which opened the spring season at the Loeb last night. And it's nice to know that well, next time the playwright will sing to us. Yes, that's nice to know-and yet, that doesn't tell you much about what the playwright is doing this time around. So let me due you in: this time he is talking. And talking and talking and talking. After two hours, I thought I would go out of my mind...
...Sheanshang is magnificently fiery as the play's quasi-narrator, and Virginia Cook, a fine comedienne, plays confusion in the best Morton Lorne manner. Leigh Woods, as an actor playing a hermit whose life is investigated by the others, makes his character live in the brief sections where the playwright lets him live. But most of the time, Saunders has the hermit's tragedy described to us, rather than letting us see it for ourselves...
Pirandello used to ponder the curious fate of the great playwright who, being mortal, changed and died, but whose characters were immutable and immortal. Witnessing great drama means spending an evening with these immortals. The Three Sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, who yearn in vain to go to Moscow, have a place in the minds and hearts of people who have never even seen the Chekhov play...
...provincial town, a woman of fire, intelligence, gravity and spirit, married to a bureaucratic paper clip of a man who bores her to headaches rather than tears. Impelled to passion with a man who must leave her, she conveys a heartrending gallantry. Perhaps the saddest fate of a great playwright is not to live to see performances like this...