Gosh, all the greats are leaving with Dame Elizabeth Taylor today.
The New York Times reports on Lebanese-American, pullitzer winning playwright, Lanford Wilson passing away at a young 73.
Margolit Fox writes – “Stylistically, the distinguishing hallmark of Mr. Wilson’s work was his dialogue — authentic, gritty, often overlapping — be it the speech of his native Missouri or adopted New York. To audiences, his approach gave the experience of eavesdropping on real, bustling people in real, bustling time. (As a young playwright honing his craft, he later explained, he would set himself exercises like writing down the overheard speech of five people talking at once.)
Lanford Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose work — earthy, realist, greatly admired, widely performed — centered on the sheer ordinariness of marginality, died on Thursday in Wayne, N.J. He was 73 and lived in Sag Harbor, on Long Island. The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Marshall W. Mason, a director and longtime collaborator who is widely considered the foremost interpreter of Mr. Wilson’s work.
One of the most distinguished American playwrights of the late 20th century, Mr. Wilson was considered instrumental in drawing attention to Off Off Broadway, where his first works were staged in the mid-1960s. He was also among the first playwrights to move from that milieu to renown on wider stages, ascending to Off Broadway, and then to Broadway with no Off’s whatsoever, within a decade of his arrival in New York.
His work has also long been a staple of regional theaters throughout the United States.
Mr. Wilson won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for drama for “Talley’s Folly,” which played 286 performances on Broadway that year. A one-act, two-character comedy set in his hometown, Lebanon, Mo., the play chronicled the romantic fortunes of a Jewish man (played by Judd Hirsch) and a Protestant woman (Trish Hawkins) in 1944.
“Talley’s Folly” was an installment in Mr. Wilson’s Talley Cycle, an eventual trilogy. The cycle also comprised “Talley & Son,” which played Off Broadway in 1985 and also looked in on the Talley family in 1944; and “Fifth of July,” which takes up the family’s story in 1977.”
For an artists work, go here to read an American story of an artist via Missouri. Mr. Wilson was noted for being one of the first mainstream playwrights to create central, meaningful gay and lesbian characters for the theater.
At the time of writing he is no.1 on google’s search engine.
~Posted by Horiwood.Com, Hollywood California USA. 3.24.11~
