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Literature Criticism
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)The importance of Lorraine Hansberry as an American dramatist rests with two plays, A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, both produced during her tragically short life of 34 years. The first, by...
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From:Contemporary American DramatistsWere it not for the success of J.B.: A Play in Verse, Archibald MacLeish would be just another of the many modern poets who yearned to hear their verse in the theatre without accommodating that verse to the exigencies of...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)In his review of the Yale Repertory Theatre production of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom in 1984, the New York Times critic Frank Rich hailed August Wilson as a "major find for the American Theatre." Within the next eight...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Critics are divided as to whether Edward Albee is a realist or absurdist. Critics and public are divided as to the quality of his writing after Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Actors and directors are divided as to...
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From:Contemporary Dramatists (5th ed.)Lanford Wilson's plays are deeply concerned with the conflict between the traditional values of the past and the insidious pressures of modern life. While he has been only intermittently successful at resolving this...
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From: New Essays on American Drama[(essay date 1989) In the following essay, Grabes assesses O'Neill's influence on American drama and theater.] If asked to name the most important, successful and impressive American dramatist, few critics would...
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From:Gay & Lesbian Literature (Vol. 1. )"Kramer equals controversy," wrote Paula Span in the Washington Post. From the time he burst on the gay literary scene with his novel Faggots, Larry Kramer has waged a war within and against a community built on sexual...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)William Inge remains an interesting phenomenon in American drama. His impact upon critic and public alike demands that he be included in any serious consideration of the postwar theatre, but in subject matter and in...
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From:Gay & Lesbian Literature (Vol. 1. )At age 36, playwright Tony Kushner did not have a long list of productions to his credit, but he did have a Pulitzer Prize for a play that Newsweek called "the biggest event involving the gay movement in the history of...
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From:Contemporary American DramatistsBest known as the author of the novel Nightwood, Djuna Barnes turned to drama early and late in her career. Three one-act plays were performed by the Provincetown Players and three published in A Book. In 1958 she...
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From:Contemporary Dramatists (5th ed.)Charles Gordone first came to public attention as an actor in the tumultuous 1961 New York production of Genet's The Blacks. In addition to Gordone, the cast for that production included James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson,...
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From:Contemporary Dramatists (5th ed.)Actor/drag queen Harvey Fierstein began writing plays at age 20 so as to create roles for himself. His first attempt concerned his efforts to clean Harry Koutoukas's apartment, a horrifying task which he undertook so...
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From:Feminist WritersRaised in Jackson, Mississippi, the second of four daughters born to parents who loved the stage, Beth Henley grew up watching her mother, an actor, rehearse various roles with the Jackson Community Theater. Captivated...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Lillian Hellman freely admitted that she was a moral writer, that she could not deny herself that final summing up, and in this play she made a resounding statement about "the little foxes that spoil the vines." Called...
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From:Contemporary American DramatistsWilliam Inge is the quintessential mid-20th century Midwestern American playwright. His reputation rests on four plays written during the 1950s: Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic; Bus Stop; and The Dark at the Top of the...
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From:Contemporary Dramatists (5th ed.)At the dawn of the 1960s Edward Albee introduced a humorous self-definition on stage with FAM, the "Famous American playwright," and YAM, the "Young American playwright," thus forecasting his exemplary career. Regarded...
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From:Contemporary Dramatists (5th ed.)Israel Horovitz has produced a large volume of work since the 1970s, leaving audiences with the impression of a writer with broad concerns, varying aesthetic impulses, and an impish overview of the human condition. The...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Moss Hart's first play, The Hold-Up Man, written when he was 19, folded in Chicago. But his Once in a Lifetime caught Sam Harris's eye, he was given George S. Kaufman as a collaborator (a story wittily told in Hart's...
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From: Studies in the Humanities[(essay date June-December 1998) In the following essay, Plunka concentrates on Guare's dark sense of humor and bitterly ironic plot twists in The House of Blue Leaves.] John Guare, Edward Albee, David Mamet, August...
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From:Contemporary Dramatists (5th ed.)"I know now, all these years and plays later, that I always write about solitary confinement." If this realisation only came to Marsha Norman with the anthologising of Getting Out in 1988, it also eluded critics who...