Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...Philanthropist, produced by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theater, opens literally with a bang. A young playwright blows his brains out in the lodgings of a philologist. Then it settles down into a satirical, searching account of the philologist's quest for some spiritual anagram for happiness. Such ups and downs occur throughout the play. The ups are sufficiently impressive that it is hard to believe that the author, Christopher Hampton, is only 24. Yet it remains for a leading actor, Alec McCowen, to lift the production as a whole onto a plane of compelling theater...
NAKED woman, black woman, clothed with your color which is life, with your form which is beauty . . ./ Your solemn contralto voice is the spiritual song of the beloved." So wrote Senegal's Poet-President Leopold Senghor. A beautiful Ghanaian playwright and teacher, Effua Sutherland, recently tried to describe another aspect of the African woman's traditional role. "She is a goddess because she founds society. Her breasts are more of a motherly symbol than a sexual one. She is the power behind man." Mrs. Sutherland carefully recited the words of English Explorer Mary Kingsley, who once wrote...
Like many ancient crafts, pure farce disappeared long ago; it was replaced by the machine-tooled "sitcom" or by crude, graffiti-black comedy. But British Playwright Joe Orton was not a man to ride a trend. In the '60s he wrote a cycle of extravagant farces, most of them failures on and off Broadway. Orton would not bow to the times, but circumstances eventually bent to him. His last play, What the Butler Saw, is now an off-Broadway smash. The American stage production of Entertaining Mr. Sloane lasted only 13 performances; the film version is a savagely witty...
Some performances are exceptionally good. Sheila Hart's Penny Sycamore, the zany lady who becomes a playwright because a typewriter was mistakenly delivered to her address, is brilliantly performed: she has assimilated the character so well that her dialogue does not exist as lines, a guile-lessness making at once for high comedy and fine acting. Llody Schwartz's Kolenkhov is a natural scene-stealer. He pronounces "The Monte Carlo Ballet" with just the right Bela Lugosi intonation, he talks and gestures like a proud Rasputin fallen on bad times, and his Romanov leer is so hilariously Russian that...
South African Playwright Athol Fugard should bless his actors for breathing vitality into his stillborn script. James Earl Jones pours out his rage at existence like a volcanic river of fire, and Ruby Dee's face is one of those relief maps of pain, torment and humiliation that characterize a life when it is brutal, nasty and interminable. The pair ought to get a bonus in salvage...