Word: playwrighting
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...playwright, Alan Ayckbourn, 51, is represented in the West End by a new play, Man of the Moment, and a stunning revival, Absurd Person Singular, and at his regional theater in Scarborough by yet another debut, Body Language. All three are characteristically bleak and acidulous comedies staged by the author himself. The conventional wisdom about Ayckbourn has been that he started as a boulevard farceur and turned darker in the course of his 39 plays. Yet Absurd, from supposedly sunnier days in 1971, shows that acutely observed misery and hypocrisy have been his comic subjects all along. The funniest scene...
Poland has journalist Tadeusz Mazowiecki as Prime Minister. Czechoslovakia has playwright Vaclav Havel as President. Last week Hungary also put a writer at the helm. The parliament elected Arpad Goencz, an English translator and former dissident who spent six years in jail after the 1956 revolution, as the country's new interim and largely ceremonial President...
...Brest-Litovsk was suppressed for more than two decades. When it finally debuted in 1987, however, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev attended the premiere; afterward he endorsed the play and embraced its leading actor, his friend Mikhail Ulyanov. One version has Gorbachev saying, "That is me. That is me." Playwright Mikhail Shatrov, 58, says that the actual words were more restrained but that Gorbachev openly drew parallels between Lenin's reluctant peace with imperial Germany and his own reform and retrenchment. Thus the staging of Shatrov's text became a political as well as an artistic event, a landmark of changing...
...answering this question, the play takes off in all sorts of comic directions. There are phone calls to the playwright himself incorporating a tape recorded voice that sounds pretty much like Woody Allen, and an appearance by Blanche DuBois, followed by Groucho Marx and a messenger from Western Union. All these arbitrary appearances serve to make the play a bizarre and entertaining satire of drama in general...
Stoppard employs an almost cinematic technique of cutting between actual scenes from Hamlet and his own invention. His manner is witty without being jarring, and the cast of this production are careful that the transitions are as natural and unnatural as the playwright intended...