Theresa Rebeck: Complete Plays, Vol. 1: 1989-1998 - Softcover

Rebeck, Theresa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1575251728 ISBN 13: 9781575251721

Publisher: Smith & Kraus Pub Inc, 1999

Synopsis

I am a woman; I am an American; I am a mother; I sometimes write for television, and I sometimes write movies; I play the piano; I knit; I rail at the universe; I am angry; I am sad; I am a comic realist, a misanthrope, and an idealist. There are many ways to categorize me and my work. But for myself, I would most like to be considered a playwright. - Theresa Rebeck, Introduction

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Reviews

Rebeck has yet to write that big play that will make her a national name. But she has enjoyed some success off-Broadway and in regional theater with Spike Heels and View of the Dome and has produced one flat-out comic masterpiece, The Family of Mann. This book of five full-length plays and six one-acts represents nine years of writing. The plays, if not all equally strong--some of the early ones take too long to get rolling--feature well-conceived characters and clear, forceful, well-written dialogue. The Family of Mann, an angry screed against the narrow, sexist, infantile world of TV writing, is particularly strong. Every major living playwright (Mamet, Kopit, Shanley, etc.) has tackled Hollywood's cloud-cuckooland, but no one else has portrayed its mixture of stupidity and crude power politics as well as Rebeck does. Ironically, Rebeck reveals in the introduction, she currently makes her living writing scripts for the likes of NYPD Blue. TV's gain is theater's loss; even the quickest perusal of her dramatic output bears that out. Jack Helbig

"The only people who write for the theatre these days," quips a character in Rebeck's The Family of Mann, "are people who can't get work in television." Whatever sardonic truth that observation may hold, it certainly does not apply to award-winning playwright and screenwriter Rebeck, whose collected plays are now the latest entry in the publisher's wonderful "Contemporary Playwrights" series. This anthology includes five full-length plays and seven previously unpublished one-acts. Referring to herself as a "comic realist," Rebeck explores contemporary American culture, often using relationships, television, and politics as landscapes against which volatile combinations of sex and power (as in the prophetic pre-Bill and Monica piece View of the Dome) are played out. That Rebeck should now find herself in the company of playwrights like Horton Foote, Romulus Linney, Christopher Durang, Eric Overmeyer, and Lanford Wilson, all of whom have been included in the "Contemporary Playwrights" series, is proof that her theatrical star is in the ascendant. For all contemporary theater collections.ABarry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Smith & Kraus Pub Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1575251728
• ISBN 13: 9781575251721
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 391