Did Shakespeare Have a Hand in the Writing of OTHER Elizabethan plays?

Yes.

August Osage County

Tom Stoppard Writes Pink Floyd Play

In honor of the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd's classic album, Stoppard has written a short play for the BBC.

From a piece in the Guardian...

Stoppard's hour-long play, called Dark Side, will incorporate music from the album, which stayed in the charts for 741 weeks until 1988, and what is described as a "fantastical and psychedelic story that takes listeners on a journey through their imaginations".

Stoppard, a long-time Pink Floyd fan who was first approached with the idea of writing a play about the album by a friend in 1973, said: "This is more or less, I think, the first time anything like this has been done on radio.

"[I thought] 'Yes I definitely want to do that,' but had no idea for a long time what I would do. Finally, I found some time and sat down and listened to the album for the thousandth time and picked up from the beginning and kept going."

The lead roles will be taken by Iwan Rheon, best known for his portrayal of Simon Bellamy in E4's Misfits, and stage actor Amaka Okafor, with contributions from Nighy, Sewell and Adrian Scarborough.

Pink Floyd's David Gilmour said: "I have read the script of Tom's radio play and found it fascinating.

Shakespeare - Tax Dodging Food Hoarder

Could Shakespeare’s Coriolanus have been his way of trying to expunge a guilty conscience?

From a piece in the Sunday Times...

The play depicts a famine created and exploited by rich merchants and politicians to maximise the price of food and includes the lines: “They ne’er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses crammed with grain”. 

It has now emerged that as Shakespeare wrote the play at the height of the 1607 food riots, he was himself hoarding grain. As one of the biggest landowners in Warwickshire, he was ideally placed to push prices up and then sell at the top of the market. 

“There was another side to Shakespeare besides the brilliant playwright — as a ruthless businessman who did all he could to avoid taxes, maximise profits at others’ expense and exploit the vulnerable — while also writing plays about their plight to entertain them,” said Jayne Archer, a researcher in Renaissance literature at Aberystwyth University.

Edward Albee Interviewed

How Edward Albee is Still Redefining Himself

It's been 50 years since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Vulture profiles the playwright, here.

From the piece...

During our conversation, he hands down several tabletsful of similarly exacting commandments, about playwriting and life. Never work on anything you’re not enjoying; “otherwise it’s just typing.” Never criticize what you’re writing while you’re writing it. Live in the reality of what’s happening, not in your interpretation of it. Every time you write a play, write the first play anybody’s ever written. Don’t strategize your feelings; just feel. Don’t write to solve your problems; you won’t.

The aim seems to be to plant his flag in an eternal present in which there is no expectation and no second-guessing. Still, he has often violated his proscription against revising old plays. In 2004, the one-act Zoo Story got sutured to a new one-act called Homelife to form an entity now known officially (and tellingly) as Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo. And most major productions of Virginia Woolf — his first full-length work and still his most famous—have endured his fiddling. For the 2005 version, he omitted several pages at the end of Act Two that he thought were overwritten. The current revival, starring Tracy Letts and Amy Morton, may well see the benefit of even further compression. “I don’t want to bore me or anyone else,” he says. Which is why the revisions, he insists, “are always cutting.”

“Always cutting” might well be his watch cry, if not yet his epitaph.

Arthur Miller Interviewed

Listen, here.

The Strange Case of a Fake Ibsen Play

Literary experts are embarrassed after 'lost fragments' of work by Norway's famous playwright are alleged to have been forged.

From an article in the Guardian...

Over the next few months, investigators from the Norwegian police's economic crimes unit will be combing the market for supposed possessions and letters relating to the playwright Henrik Ibsen, and the Nobel-winning novelist – and Nazi sympathiser – Knut Hamsun as part of investigations into an alleged scam that exploited the nation's interest in its most celebrated authors.

More than a dozen documents are alleged to have been forged by Geir Ove Kvalheim, a Norwegian scriptwriter and actor, who has been charged and is due go on trial in April.

The alleged fraud was only revealed when Kvalheim sensationally claimed to have discovered fragments of a previously unknown Ibsen play, The Sun God, a find that would have changed Norwegian literary history.

A Play About Marie Curie...By Alan Alda

Smithsonian Magazine interviews Alan Alda about his new work.

From the piece...

What got you interested in Marie Curie?

What got me interested was that this part of her life is such a dramatic story. But what kept me interested and what kept me going for the four years I’ve been working on the play was her amazing ability not to let anything stop her. The more I learn, the more I realize what she had to struggle against, and she has become my hero because of that. For most of my life, I couldn’t say I had any heroes—I never really came across somebody like this who was so remarkable in her ability to keep going no matter what. It really had an effect on me.

How did you decide to write a play about her life?

I started out thinking it would be interesting to have a reading of her letters at the World Science Festival in New York, which I help put on every year. Then, I found out that the letters were radioactive—they are all collected in a library in Paris and you have to sign a waiver that you realize you’re handling radioactive material. I just wasn’t brave enough to do it. So [in 2008] I put together a nice one-act play about Einstein. But I became so interested in researching Curie that I really wanted to write about her in a full-length play.

Famous Plays in Space

Enjoy!

Want to Read an Unpublished Yeats Play?

You're in luck.

The New John Mellencamp, Stephen King Musical

The New York Times takes note of Ghost Brothers of Darkland County.

From the post...

The musical, which has been at least 11 years in the making, has been described as a Southern gothic work based on a true story that Mr. Mellencamp wanted to fashion for the stage in the spirit of Tennessee Williams, a long-time influence on the singer. Events in the musical take place, for instance, in the Mississippi town of Lake Belle Reve; Belle Reve is the name of the one-time Mississippi homestead of Blanche DuBois and her sister Stella in Williams’s play “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

The musical’s plot concerns a 40-year-old tragedy that has haunted the character Joe McCandless: the deaths of his two brothers, who hated each other, and a young girl. Those two brothers are now ghosts in a family cabin where Joe brings his own two troubled sons who seem on the verge of repeating family history.

Suzanne Vega Discusses Her New Carson McCullers Play

Happy 100th Birthday, Tennessee Williams

NPR sings praise of the famous playwright, here.

Waiting for Godot - The Game

Play it, here.

Shouldn't There by More Sci-Fi on Stage?

The Guardian explores this question.

From the piece...

Playwrights who choose to stray into sci-fi territory often do so almost apologetically – creating plausible near-futures, recognisable worlds that differ from ours only in minor details. Steve Waters's double bill of plays about climate change, The Contingency Plan, did this particularly effectively, and Australian playwright Ben Ellis went down a similar path with GM crops in his Poet No 7. The term Atwood prefers is speculative fiction, and that feels apt in this instance.

Alan Ayckbourn ventures deeper into these waters: his play Comic Potential uses androids to explore what it means to be human. A similar device is used in Tamsin Oglesby's play Really Old, Like Forty Five, which recently opened at the National. While opinions about Oglesby's play have been divided – ranging from four stars in the Guardian to one dreg in the West End Whingers' new wine-based rating system, most agreed on the calibre of Michela Meazza's performance as Mimi, the robot nurse with the eerie crimson grin who purrs like a cat when she's stroked.

A delicate balance is required to combat the fact that what might be acceptable on screen or paper can look absurd on stage.

The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams

How did the title of one of Williams' best-known plays come to be? Gary Dexter lets us know.

From the piece...

Tennessee Williams’ sister Rose suffered from lifelong mental illness, and underwent a pre-frontal lobotomy in 1937. The operation was new and untested, and in Rose’s case was a disastrous failure, leaving her permanently brain-damaged. She spent the rest of her life in institutions, unsure who she or her family were, and convinced that she was forever twenty-eight years old. Tennessee Williams’ attempt to explore the tragedy of Rose gave rise to many of his greatest plays, and Rose herself appears in various guises throughout his work.

Here's a bit of the play, one that has Katharine Hepburn and Sam Watterson:

Horton Foote, Screenwriter, Dead at 92

The great Horton Foote died recently. Among his many accomplishments was writing the screenplay to one of my favorite movies, "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Here's Gregory Peck previewing the movie:

What Should I Write? VOTE NOW!

I've had all sorts of ideas about books I should write lately but the ideas always get in the way of actually doing them. "Ooh! I should write about THAT!" I think to myself and then say, "But what about that?!" Help me with this dilemma, will you?

Vote for your favorite idea in the comments section and I'll write it this year.



1) The Fake American History Book

I've always thought it'd be fun to write a U.S. history textbook that's almost true. That is to say, write it like a normal history book but throw in a bunch of ridiculous lies that almost sound like they could be true but aren't. Then, push it further.



2) House of Ashes

A novel revolving around a missing child and a crumbling marriage.

3) Frontier Psychiatrist



A novel based on the song above.



4) Boston Corbett

A biography or novel or full-length play based on this man - the man who killed the man who killed Abraham Lincoln.

There you have it. Some serious books. Some not-so-serious books. What say you, my friends?

VOTE NOW!

I Think It's Time for Me To Revisit This...

To write a musical comedy about the Donner Party. Seriously, should be a hoot.