8/3/2023 0 Comments America elsewhereThe arrival of Not About Nightingales, one of the bigger items from that beginner's trunk, is a classic tale of archival recovery. While Off-Broadway troupes like The Wooster Group and New York Theatre Workshop are searching out new approaches to rarely seen O'Neill plays like The Hairy Ape and More Stately Mansions, the prizewinner in this realm is surely Williams, who had built up a trunkful of arresting scripts before he finally reached Broadway with The Glass Menagerie in 1944, and whose late works, shunned in more conventional days as too daring for the mainstream, are waiting to be explored. Because of their sustained commitment to the theatre, each of our three eminences has piled up a vast archive of work, containing all sorts of unexpected treasures. But as the century moves toward its end, the traditional linkup of a familiar play and a prominent actor isn't the only way master playwrights can find themselves at the cutting edge of the art. The role was created in 1946 by the aging, beloved vaudeville performer James Barton Jose Quintero's 1956 Off Broadway production lifted Jason Robards to stardom and established the piece as a classic, after which Circle in the Square, having moved uptown, revived it twice on Broadway: in 1973 with James Earl Jones as Hickey and in 1989 with Robards in the role once again. Its central role, the cunning and driven hardware salesman Hickey, climaxes in a flamboyant confessional monologue, eight pages long-such an irresistible lure to stars who want to display their knack for bravura that the current hit version, starring Kevin Spacey, is actually the play's fourth Broadway rendition, despite the work's length (over four hours) and pessimistic outlook. His father, 19th-century stage star James O'Neill, was legendary for his prowess at acting-and at drinking.īoth performing and drinking are memorialized to some extent in The Iceman Cometh, set in a 1912 Greenwich Village saloon, peopled by alcoholic losers and deadbeats whose barroom repartee is distinctive and flavorful enough to make each of the play's 15-plus parts worth a major actor's time. O'Neill, in some respects the best of them all at creating vivid, playable roles, more or less grew up in the theatre. Williams, for all his poetic extravagance and often rarefied symbolism, never wrote a line an actor wouldn't relish speaking. Miller's speeches and scenes are the backbone of every acting class. Mentioning Dennehy and Franz brings up a second, even more important reason for the three authors' enduring presence: All of them wrote sublimely well for actors. But Robert Falls's much-lauded production shifts its emphasis: Brian Dennehy's big, almost menacing presence makes Willy Loman less of a fall guy, more a self-willed agent of his own destruction, while Elizabeth Franz's blazing fervor turns his patient wife Linda, unexpectedly, into a kind of feminist heroine, casting a new hot light on the way the play's men downgrade women. Death of a Salesman, for instance, appears on so many required reading lists that most Americans might think they know it by heart from their schooldays. Exciting to theatregoers who experience them for the first time, the trio's major plays can still grab audience members who've seen them before their rich, complex textures always offer new revelations. In the first place, obviously, they're great. Why have America's Three Greats suddenly made such a triumphant comeback at the end of what's often been called "the American century?" The answer has many parts. And two blocks farther north, lighting up the long-vacant Circle in the Square, sits the most surprising Broadway success of them all: Not About Nightingales, a previously unperformed Tennessee Williams work that more than one reviewer has called the season's best new play. One block up, Miller's 1949 classic Death of a Salesman glows anew in a production shipped east from Chicago's Goodman Theatre, with Brian Dennehy, Elizabeth Franz and Kevin Anderson heading the cast (although the Eugene O'Neill Theatre's marquee seems to give Iceman's author top billing, as if his spirit somehow presided over Miller's mordant drama). A revival of O'Neill's lengthy, somber 1946 saloon drama, The Iceman Cometh, transported from London but with a largely American cast, has taken over the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Yet all three are, once again, the toast of Broadway. But Williams has been dead for 16 years, O'Neill for 46. Morgan both premiered Off-Broadway in 1998. Peters' Connections and The Ride Down Mt. Miller, at 81, is still healthy and productive-two recent plays, Mr. Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller: The three giants of American playwriting are already enshrined in the theatre history textbooks.
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