"Without doubt she is the most eminent playwright that we have at the moment," says Max Stafford-Clark; his Joint Stock theatre company's famous workshop methods helped give birth to Light Shining, as well as other works including Cloud 9 and Fen.
"Lincoln," released by Disney's Touchstone Pictures, is a long, lavish, talky historical pageant, featuring some of the finest and best-known actors in movies, written by an eminent playwright (Tony Kushner) and directed by a man (Steven Spielberg) whose name is virtually synonymous with large-scale, blockbuster entertainment.
"Oona [sic] said, 'Oh, dear,' as if someone had spilled a teaspoonful of salt, rose from the debris in front of her, and suggested that it was 'time for us to move back into the drawing room.' Two of the sturdier gentlemen guests lifted the eminent playwright from where he had fallen and carried him into the adjoining chamber, where they deposited him, breathing heavily, on an ancient sofa".
Her sitters included local fringe luminaries like Penny Arcade, Brian Damage, Kembra Pfahler, Larry Shox, Alexina Shufeldt and the eminent playwright-poet-performer Edgar Oliver, who is Ms. Adelson's brother and for whom she has designed sets.
In a letter to the Observer, 25 of the country's most eminent playwrights, lawyers, politicians and artists say that more than two decades after the British people spoke out against apartheid in South Africa, it was their turn to reciprocate with support for a country that is in danger of betraying that honourable history.
Occasionally banned and denounced in East Germany during the decades before he was hailed as its pre-eminent playwright, Muller was known when the 1970's began (mostly by specialists, in the West) as the author of bravely impressive but somewhat dour classical adaptations, Brechtian "learning plays," and realistic dramas about the problems of building socialism.
It was not until after the death of the old master Aeschylus in 456 BC that Sophocles became the pre-eminent playwright in Athens.
Her father, Maxwell Anderson, was then one of Broadway's pre-eminent playwrights, averaging a new play a year.
Aside from the tireless (and seemingly immortal) Horton Foote, no eminent American playwright of the last few decades rivals the staying power and productivity of Mr. Gurney.
What he cannot have imagined was that his pithy reply would, a year and a bit later, give rise to a play at Britain's National Theatre, written by an eminent English playwright, Sir David Hare.
Yet I was deeply moved by the high-concept staging that the eminent German playwright and filmmaker Tankred Dorst mounted at the Bayreuth Festival in 2006 that will be revived this summer.
