Category Archives: playwriting
Jamie Lloyd Reminds Us of Some Essentials
A New York Post writer named John Oleksinski recently wrote an article in which he chided Broadway producers for productions that charge big money but offer skimpy production values. Oleksinski claims that chintziness in scenery is based in a desire … Continue reading
Homeless, Lizzie Borden and Three Plays With Brooklyn Connections
A few days ago, as I was leaving the Upper West Side building where my wife and I live, I ran into one of our neighbors, a former state Supreme Court judge. She knows I’m a playwright and a theater … Continue reading
Chasing Stories
If you took a census of all of the characters who are alive in my mind, it wouldn’t surprise me if the number reached into the thousands. Sherlock Holmes and Mama Rose, Clytemnestra and Walter Lee Younger, Jackie Brown and … Continue reading
“Raisin in the Sun” at the Public
The first grown-up straight play I remember seeing was Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in Chicago. I didn’t see it the first time it played Chicago, when it stopped there on its way to Broadway in February 1959 … Continue reading
Watching a TV series reminds me of a play I saw in 2007
Watched an oddball but extremely affecting British miniseries on Britbox tonight called Don’t Forget the Driver starring Toby Jones (in two roles) and co-written by Jones and Tim Crouch. The plot concerns a bus driver in Bognor Regis who discovers, … Continue reading
“American Buffalo” on Broadway
In 2001, I served on a grand jury. At one point, an ADA played for us a recording from a wiretap. It was a conversation between two members of a violent drug gang. One was assigning the other to kill … Continue reading
SPACE DOGS and ENGLISH
It’s no surprise that American playwrights usually write plays set in America. It is a little surprising that three current off-Broadway plays by American playwrights are, in fact, set outside our borders. I wrote recently about Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for … Continue reading
“Long Day’s Journey Into Night” – sort of
The program that comes with the off-Broadway production at the Minetta Lane Theater says the play on offer is Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill. And it’s true that every word spoken on the stage is by O’Neill. … Continue reading
Thoughts after watching THE VERDICT
Just watched The Verdict for the first time since it came out forty years ago in 1982. Sidney Lumet at the top of his game, a perfect damn script by David Mamet (I can’t say how much it owes to the … Continue reading
Jeffrey Sweet--Making the Scene 