What do we want these days from the theater? Increasingly, or so audiences as much as dictate, stories that come to a handy, even cozy conclusion, where life’s knots aren’t so much sentimentally unraveled as they are re- assembled in a nice, neat bow. So the London stage deserves credit this, and virtually every, season for proffering plays that take the harder, more circuitous path, leaving open-ended the fates of characters whom lesser writers would lead to the sort of preordained conclusion that leaves spectators happy but isn’t necessarily true to life.
Matt Wolf ponders the messier side of London’s playwriting world in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune. Read the rest of the article here. Then reflect on how pioneering American playwrights — and audiences — have left the English in the dust when it comes to taking chances.
Mickey Birnbaum
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