Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Lemon Sky is one of those plays about a sensitive adolescent living in a troubled family under the wrathful eye of a callous and cruel parent (usually the father) who subsequently becomes a sensitive young playwright who writes plays like Lemon Sky. When such a play comes from the heart, it can be lyrically powerful. Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie is the classic example. A first-rate drama of this kind opened off-Broadway a few weeks ago, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, and deservedly won the New York Drama Critics' Circle...
Lemon Sky is an indifferent sample of the genre, possibly because it comes mainly from Playwright Lanford Wilson's larynx. His hero, Alan, is a compulsive monologist who alternates between flip quips and narcissistic arias of self-pity. The interspersing of frequent asides and stream-of-consciousness speeches creates the undramatic effect of a man too busy commenting on his life to live it. As Alan, Christopher Walken handles these technical devices with an admirable fluidity, and makes the boy more humanly vulnerable than his words. In the hiss-the-father department, Charles Durning fashions an equally well-shaded...
...this level, Playwright Myrna Lamb casts one ambiguous vote for hanky-panky. On the Brechtian Greek chorus song-and-dance level she casts one unambiguous vote for women's freedom. The chorus delineates the roles into which women have presumably been thrust and demeaned-cook, clerk, wife, mother and sexual plaything...
...necessary to agree with the agitprop to discern in Playwright Lamb a deft lyricist with barbed wit and a no-nonsense lucidity about contemporary man-woman relationships. Papp moves an able cast around with fluent precision; as the other woman, April Shawhan is certainly one of the loveliest warriors who ever enlisted in the battle of the sexes...
...managed to lodge and rehearse a 19-member cast in the White Way Hotel, where his brother-in-law is the hotel manager. Miller's line of credit consists of exactly 67? cash (in the playwright's pocket) and $1,200 in unpaid hotel bills. Suddenly a dragon of a hotel inspector is breathing fire down everyone's neck. Fortuitously, a backer appears. At one of many crucial and hilarious moments, Miller, with no ink in his pen, frantically tries to pierce his wrist and draw blood so that the angel can sign the contract. From then...