Articles from Theatre Arts Magazine
In celebration of being awarded a Pulitzer Prize for having written the best American play of 1920 (Beyond the Horizon), theater critic Walter Prichard Eaton (1878 – 1957) saw fit to slip playwright Eugene O’Neill his back hand with a double-dose of venomous criticism:
…O’Neill’s work to date remains intellectually and spiritually thin.
Poet and playwright W.B. Yeats (1865 – 1939) had his say on the matter of theater-subscriber-book-of-the-month-club types who are more likely to attend performances because they feel they should, rather than attending for their own reasons of personal enjoyment:
And the worst of it is that I could not pay my players, or the seamstresses, or the owner of the building, unless I could draw to my plays those who prefer light amusement, or who have no ear for verse and literature, and fortunately they are all very polite.
Poet and playwright W.B. Yeats (1865 – 1939) had his say on the matter of theater-subscriber-book-of-the-month-club types who are more likely to attend performances because they feel they should, rather than attending for their own reasons of personal enjoyment:
And the worst of it is that I could not pay my players, or the seamstresses, or the owner of the building, unless I could draw to my plays those who prefer light amusement, or who have no ear for verse and literature, and fortunately they are all very polite.
When the writer and editor Montrose J. Moses (1878 – 1934) got some quality time with the fifty-four year old poet and playwright William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) they discussed Irish theater, contemporary poetry, the collective literary merits of their generation and a good deal more. Unlike their visits in earlier days, Yeats was by then a respected icon in the republic of letters (having been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature a year earlier).
The back-and-forth that took place throughout a number of Florentine conversations between journalist Fredericka V. Blankner and Italian writer and drama theorist Luigi Pirandello (1867 – 1936: awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934) were printed in her 1928 article, Pirandello, Paradox:
I see life, says Pirandello, as a tragedy…
