Essays on Politics Page 343

At a postplay discussion following a performance of Russian playwright Edvard Radzinsky’s An Old Actress in the Role of Dostoevsky’s Wife running through Nov. 13 at the Jean Cocteau Repertory in New York a woman in the audience wanted to know why she had never heard of the author. How, she wondered, could she be…

He’s an extraordinary playwright because he tends to handle very large issues–there’s such admirable, courageous ambition in his work. He also has an extremely courageous theatrical sense. Some of the effects he calls for in his plays simply can’t be realized.” With this animated rush of words, Jeff Steitzer talks about Peter Barnes, the English…

All’s quiet now on the behind-the-scenes front at London’s Royal Court Theatre, which means the Sloane Square playhouse can devote its attentions to its real function as Britain’s premier theatre for new writing. But it wasn’t always thus, and who know how long the calm will last? The British press spent 1991 reporting all manner…

Ever since Montgomery tycoon William S. Blount wrote the largest single check ever given to an American theatre, the staff of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival has practiced an efficient routine for impressing those out-of-state visitors who seem to think that the title of the company is a charming oxymoron. If all goes as planned, the…

At the Democratic convention of 1924, throngs of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen (who backed William McAdoo, the southern favorite) and phalanxes of Catholic priests (who supported Alfred E. Smith, the Tammany candidate) stood at opposite ends of Madison Square Garden and howled at one another. The Klan, which had 340 delegates, was powerful enough to…

David Mamet’s new play, Oleanna, is an urgent, upsetting examination of sexual harassment, a subject that has gripped America since the Clarence Thomas hearings. When the play premiered last October in Cambridge, Mass. (produced by Mamet’s own Back Bay Theatre Company in conjunction with the American Repertory Theatre), Mamet was attacked by people on both…

October is the month of that annual rite of Americana, the major league baseball World Series. So perhaps it’s fitting that it’s also the month in which Anthony Clarvoe’s comedy Let’s Play Two is making its debut at southern California’s South Coast Repertory. The new work by the busy, 31-year-old playwright marries the rhythms of…

It is Leningrad high school teacher Elena Sergeyevna’s birthday. Four of her students – three boys and a girl – arrive unexpectedly at her drab little apartment, bearing expensive gifts: a bouquet of flowers, a set of antique crystal goblets, a bottle of champagne. The offerings of grateful young people to a beloved instructor? Not…

In his play ‘An Inspector Calls’ how does Priestley use dramatic devices and language to convey his concerns and sustain the interest of the audience? Priestley wrote the play ‘An Inspector Calls’ in 1945. Priestley was a socialist and had the intention of using the play ‘An Inspector Calls’ to broadcast his socialist ideas. He wanted…

The set of this play is under a proscenium arch and as this is a Victorian theatre the curtains rise up instead of going to each side. Especially for this production there is an added bit of stage at the front with twisted, bent floorboards with a trap door in. The bent floorboards represent the…