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Screenplay to John Lahr's successful dramatization of The Orton
Diaries that chronicles the last eight months of Joe Orton's life,
his growing theatrical celebrity, and the corresponding punishing
effect it had on his relationship with his friend and mentor
Kenneth Halliwell, who murdered him on August 9, 1967, and then
took his own life.
In 1993, network executives abruptly cut the final appearance of
comedian Bill Hicks - a scathing tirade of digs on the Pope and the
pro-life movement - from an episode of The Late Show with David
Letterman. His banning from the show, along with a profile in The
New Yorker by veteran writer John Lahr, catapulted Hicks to
national prominence. Just months later, at age 32, he died of
pancreatic cancer. Now available for the first time are Hick's most
critical and comic observations, gathered from his stand-up
routines, diaries, notebooks, letters, and final writings. This
collection features his controversial humor and witheringly funny
attacks on American culture, from its worship of celebrity and
material goods to its involvement in the first Gulf War. Love All
the People faithfully traces Hicks's evolution from a funny but
conventional stand-up comedian into a fearless and brilliant
iconoclast.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION The
definitive biography of America's most impassioned and lyrical
twentieth-century playwright from acclaimed theatre critic John
Lahr 'A masterpiece about a genius' Helen Mirren 'Riveting ...
masterful' Sunday Times, Books of the Year On 31 March 1945, at The
Playhouse Theatre on Forty-Eight Street the curtain rose on the
opening night of The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams, the
show's thirty-four-year-old playwright, sat hunched in an aisle
seat, looking, according to one paper, 'like a farm boy in his
Sunday best'. The Broadway premiere, which had been heading for
disaster, closed to an astonishing twenty-four curtain calls and
became an instant sell-out. Beloved by an American public,
Tennessee Williams's work - blood hot and personal - pioneered, as
Arthur Miller declared, 'a revolution' in American theatre. Tracing
Williams's turbulent moral and psychological shifts, acclaimed
theatre critic John Lahr sheds new light on the man and his work,
as well as the America his plays helped to define. Williams created
characters so large that they have become part of American
folklore: Blanche, Stanley, Big Daddy, Brick, Amanda and Laura
transcend their stories, haunting us with their fierce, flawed
lives. Similarly, Williams himself swung high and low in his
single-minded pursuit of greatness. Lahr shows how Williams's
late-blooming homosexual rebellion, his struggle against madness,
his grief-struck relationships with his combustible father, prim
and pious mother and 'mad' sister Rose, victim to one of the first
lobotomies in America, became central themes in his drama.
Including Williams's poems, stories, journals and private
correspondence in his discussion of the work - posthumously
Williams has been regarded as one of the best letter writers of his
day - Lahr delivers an astoundingly sensitive and lively
reassessment of one of America's greatest dramatists. Tennessee
Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is the long-awaited,
definitive life and a masterpiece of the biographer's art.
A great theater critic brings twentieth-century playwright Arthur
Miller's dramatic story to life with bold and revealing new
insights "Lahr's cogent analyses are revelatory. . . . He does not
reduce the work to the life, but shows how it explains the life
from which it emerges."-Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal
"New Yorker critic Lahr shines in this searching account of the
life of playwright Arthur Miller. . . . It's a great introduction
to a giant of American letters."-Publishers Weekly Distinguished
theater critic John Lahr brings unique perspective to the life of
Arthur Miller (1915-2005), the playwright who almost
single-handedly propelled twentieth-century American theater to a
new level of cultural sophistication. Organized around the fault
lines of Miller's life-his family, the Great Depression, the rise
of fascism, Elia Kazan and the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, Marilyn Monroe, Vietnam, and the rise and fall of
Miller's role as a public intellectual-this book demonstrates the
synergy between Arthur Miller's psychology and his plays.
Concentrating largely on Miller's most prolific decades of the
1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Lahr probes Miller's early playwriting
failures; his work writing radio plays during World War II after
being rejected for military service; his only novel, Focus; and his
succession of award-winning and canonical plays that include All My
Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible, providing an original
interpretation of Miller's work and his personality.
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Playwrights at Work - Interviews with Albee, Beckett, Guare, Hellman, Ionesco, Mamet, Miller, Pinter, Shepard, Simon, Stoppard, Wasserstein, Wilder, Williams, Wilson (Paperback)
Paris Review; Edited by George Plimpton; Introduction by John Lahr
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R575
R403
Discovery Miles 4 030
Save R172 (30%)
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Out of stock
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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
John Lahr, New Yorker critic, novelist, and biographer reconstructs
both the life and death of Joe Orton, an extraordinary and anarchic
playwright, whose plays scandalised and delighted the public, and
whose indecisive loyalty to a friend caused his tragic and untimely
death. 'I have high hopes of dying in my prime,' Joe Orton confided
to his diary in July, 1967. Less than one month later, Britain's
most promising comic playwright was murdered by his lover in the
London flat they had shared for fifteen years. In PRICK UP YOUR
EARS, originally chosen Book of the Year by Truman Capote and Nobel
Prize-winning novelist Patrick White when it first appeared in
1978, Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and stage
struck adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early
professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his
blistering comedies, ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE, LOOT, and WHAT THE
BUTLER SAW.
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Diarios (Spanish, Paperback)
Joe Orton; Edited by John Lahr; Translated by Angela Perez; Prologue by Luis Antonio De Villena
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R692
Discovery Miles 6 920
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Written during the last eight months of his life, these diaries are
an unfiltered narration of the life of Joe Orton, the extremely
successful and famous British playwright. On August 9, 1967, Orton
was murdered in London by Kenneth Halliwell, his lover of 16 years,
who bludgeoned him with a hammer and then immediately committed
suicide. Halliwell left a note that said that all would be
explained if the police read Orton's diaries. In the diaries, Orton
narrates his literary success, his sexual escapades--at his
mother's funeral, with a dwarf in Brighton, and, extensively, in
Tangiers--and the breakdown of his "marriage" to Halliwell, the
relationship that transformed his life and ultimately ended it.
"Escritos durante los ultimos ocho meses de su vida, estos diarios
son una narracion sin restriccion alguna de la vida de Joe Orton,
el sumamente exitoso y famoso dramaturgo ingles. El 9 de agosto de
1967, en Londres, Orton fue asesinado a martillazos por Kenneth
Halliwell, su amante de 16 anos, quien se suicido inmediatamente
despues. Halliwell dejo una nota que decia que todo quedaria
explicado cuando la policia leyera los diarios de Orton. En los
diarios, Orton narra su exito literario, sus aventuras sexuales--en
el funeral de su madre, con un enano en Brighton y, profusamente,
en Tanger--y la descomposicion de su "matrimonio" a Halliwell, la
relacion que le cambio la vida y que termino por destruirla."
A brilliant and feared critic, Kenneth Tynan was a nabob of the
National Theatre alongside Laurence Olivier, and he was also the
daring impresario who created "Oh Calcutta". He was a notorious
eccentric, a louche sophisticate: connoisseur of cuisine, wine,
literature and women. Where else could you find such a judicious
blend of aesthetics, theatre lore, love, marriage, sex and
politics? These sizzling diaries will remind older readers of a man
whose reputation as the greatest critic of the twentieth century is
still unchallenged and introduce younger readers to an electrifying
writer who simply could not be boring.
This mesmerizing story of playwright and author Joe Orton’s brief
and remarkable life was named book of the year by Truman Capote and
Nobel Prize–winning novelist Patrick White Told with precision
and extensive detail, Prick Up Your Ears is the engrossing
biography of playwright and novelist Joe Orton. Orton’s public
career spanned only three years (1964–1967), but his work made a
lasting mark on the international stage. From Entertaining Mr.
Sloane to his career-making Loot, Orton’s plays often shocked,
sometimes outraged, and always captivated audiences with their dark
yet farcical cynicism. A rising star and undeniable talent, Orton
left much undone when he was bludgeoned to death by his lover,
Kenneth Halliwell, who had educated Orton and also dreamed of
becoming a famous writer. Â Prick Up Your Ears was the basis
for the distinguished 1987 film of the same name, directed by
Stephen Frears, with a screenplay by Alan Bennett, and starring
Gary Oldman and Vanessa Redgrave. A brilliant, page-turning
examination of the dueling forces behind Orton’s work, Prick Up
Your Ears secured the playwright’s reputation as a great
twentieth-century artist.
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