In 1962, Edward Albee debuted his play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” to stunned audiences everywhere. We were not used to seeing a married couple fight in mixed company. The play was unsettling, audacious, and successful.
Continue reading → Trilling, Albee and Pinter: On Marriage as a Competition
Last night, in a horrific ending to a truly great television program, “Medium” concluded its successful seven-year run on network television. CBS rescued the show after a five-year run on NBC; but after two seasons on its network, CBS drew down the hammer and cancelled the show.
Continue reading → Medium: How to Ruin the Morality a Television Franchise
The Provincetown Playhouse holds an important niche in early American Theater History as the staging point cradle of the great Playwright Eugene O’Neill’s earliest, and most challenging, plays and the theatre was the hearthstone for premier plays written by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edward Albee, John Guare, Sam Shepherd, Charles Busch, and David Mamet.
Continue reading → The Provenance of the Provincetown Playhouse as a Failed NYU Revival
One task I give my amateur Playwriting students is to have them write a 60-second play in Two Acts using the Three Act structure. That means you have around 30 seconds to set up the plot conflict points, 20 seconds to explode the conflict and 10 seconds to bring around a catharsis and denouement.
In thinking about Eric Bentley as he stretches beyond his 93rd birthday, we are torn between the genius of his writing and his coldness as a man. Will the writing endure? Or will the chilly memory frost the evergreen talent?
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