Playwrights At Work
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Overview
The third installment in the Modern Library's Paris Review "Writers at Work" series, this is an all-new gathering of interviews with the most important and compelling playwrights of our time. Their singular takes on their craft, their influences, their lives, the state of contemporary theater, and the tricks of the trade create an illuminating and unparalleled record of the life of the theater itself."At its best, theater is an antidote to the whiff of barbarity in the millennial air. 'My feeling is that people in a group, en masse, watching something, react differently, and perhaps more profoundly, than they do when they're alone in their living rooms,' Arthur Miller says here. In the dark, facing the stage, surrounded by others, the paying customer can let himself go; he is emboldened. The theatrical encounter allows a member of the public to think against received opinions. He can submerge himself in the extraordinary, admit his darkest, most infantile wishes, feel the pulse of the contemporary, hear the sludge of street talk turned into poetry. This enterprise can be joyous and dangerous; when the theater's game is good and tense, it is both."
--from the Introduction by John Lahr
Synopsis
The third installment in the Modern Library's Paris Review "Writers at Work" series, this is an all-new gathering of interviews with the most important and compelling playwrights of our time. Their singular takes on their craft, their influences, their lives, the state of contemporary theater, and the tricks of the trade create an illuminating and unparalleled record of the life of the theater itself.
"At its best, theater is an antidote to the whiff of barbarity in the millennial air. 'My feeling is that people in a group, en masse, watching something, react differently, and perhaps more profoundly, than they do when they're alone in their living rooms,' Arthur Miller says here. In the dark, facing the stage, surrounded by others, the paying customer can let himself go; he is emboldened. The theatrical encounter allows a member of the public to think against received opinions. He can submerge himself in the extraordinary, admit his darkest, most infantile wishes, feel the pulse of the contemporary, hear the sludge of street talk turned into poetry. This enterprise can be joyous and dangerous; when the theater's game is good and tense, it is both."
—from the Introduction by John Lahr
Library Journal
This, the third in a series of reprints from the Paris Review (after Best Writers at Work and Women Writers at Work), is an intriguing primary-source collection of interviews with 16 renowned playwrights. The pieces start with a Thornton Wilder interview in 1956 and continue with Lillian Hellman (1965), Samuel Beckett (1987), Tennessee Williams (1981), Eugene Ionesco (1984), Arthur Miller (1966 and 1999), Neil Simon (1992), Edward Albee (1966), Harold Pinter (1966), Tom Stoppard (1988), John Guare (1992), Sam Shepard (1997), August Wilson (1999), David Mamet (1997), and Wendy Wasserstein (1997). The resulting essays are varied owing to the different approaches of both interviewer and playwright, but, overall, this is an excellent gathering of brilliant minds in the theater, and these interviews provide significant insight into the works of the writers. A great addition to literature and theater collections.--J. Sara Paulk, Coastal Plain Regional Lib., Tifton, GA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The third installment of the Writers at Work series compiles interviews with the seminal playwrights of our time. Here are the words of people who have shaped both our theater experience and our culture -- Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, Tom Stoppard, Neil Simon, Wendy Wasserstein, and more.Library Journal
This, the third in a series of reprints from the Paris Review (after Best Writers at Work and Women Writers at Work), is an intriguing primary-source collection of interviews with 16 renowned playwrights. The pieces start with a Thornton Wilder interview in 1956 and continue with Lillian Hellman (1965), Samuel Beckett (1987), Tennessee Williams (1981), Eugene Ionesco (1984), Arthur Miller (1966 and 1999), Neil Simon (1992), Edward Albee (1966), Harold Pinter (1966), Tom Stoppard (1988), John Guare (1992), Sam Shepard (1997), August Wilson (1999), David Mamet (1997), and Wendy Wasserstein (1997). The resulting essays are varied owing to the different approaches of both interviewer and playwright, but, overall, this is an excellent gathering of brilliant minds in the theater, and these interviews provide significant insight into the works of the writers. A great addition to literature and theater collections.--J. Sara Paulk, Coastal Plain Regional Lib., Tifton, GA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\John Stokes
There's an authentic edginess throughout this instructive and salutary book that makes it a reminder of the variety, the vulnerability, and the awful strictness of the playwright's art. Amazingly enough, despite the occasional intrusion of the interviewer, these people think they know exactly what they are doing.—Times Literary Supplement