Re: RAT The Sassies!!!!

[DgSWEET@aol.com]

I wasn't too big a fan of SALESMAN till I saw the recent Robert Falls 
revival.  Since I found tears streaming down my face, I couldn't pretend that 
the play isn't effective.

But, yeah, there are plays I think are less manipulative and more rigorous.  
those who think Wilder's OUR TOWN is a sentimental play having seen a really 
good production or read it closely enough.  It achieves heartbreak honestly 
with a strange detachment.  OUR TOWN is also notable in that it was a 
genuinely avant-garde play that nonetheless premiered and flourished within 
the commercial theatre.

Hard to name a great work for the Nineties.  There is a temptation, because 
of its size and audacity, to go for ANGELS, but somehow that doesn't quite do 
it for me.  There are some structural problems that, as I watched the play, 
didn't bother me too much, but make me hesitate to give it the crown of the 
Nineties.

I think SIX DEGREES opened in 1990, and I think that's the most impressive 
American play I've seen this decade.  Of the foreign plays I've seen, Caryl 
Churchill's MAD FOREST probably is the one that most excited me.

Of the musicals of the Nineties, the only one that was compelling enough to 
lead me to see it three times was RAGTIME.  Not perfect, but a grand 
whirligig of a construction with facets that only begin to reveal themselves 
after repeated hearings -- always something new to discover in it.

I would also nominate Viola Spolin and Paul Sills (her son) as being the most 
important influence in American theatre of the 1900s.  Between them, they 
invented theatre games, created the template for improvisational theatre, 
trained or trained the people who trained several hundred major actors, 
writers and directors, and created the story theatre form.  But I'm slightly 
prejudiced -- I wrote a book about them.



----------------------------------
Jeffrey Sweet
Resident Playwright, Victory Gardens Theatre
Faculty, Actors Studio at the New School
Council, the Dramatists Guild of America
http://members.aol.com/DgSWEET/index.html