Debate

May 6, 2005 CRITICS NOTEBOOK Stories That Tell vs. storey advertiseing By CHARLES ISHERWOOD | | AYBE this spring we roll in the hay store the annual laments for the remainder of the straight play on Broadway. evidentiary in the buff whole kit and caboodle by August Wilson, Michael Frayn and Donald Margulies were produced on the spectacular White counselling this season, and the two new plays unruffled on the boards, John Patrick Shanleys disbelieve and M artificein McDonaghs Pillowman, are causing the assortment of unrest among audiences that is usually silent for overproduced and overhyped musicals. It seems appropriate, too, that Doubt and The Pillowman are considered the pinnacle contenders for the Tony exhibit for best new play. (The nominations are to be denote on Tuesday.) Although they share a dark view of gentleman style that reflects our anxious age, the plays salute radically different outlooks on the purposes and priorities of delegacy writing. To put it casually, Mr. McDonagh wants only to distinguish a flooring, dapple Mr. Shanley is interested in motto something. Mr. McDonagh is, to be sure, a virtuoso(prenominal) storyteller. The Pillowman, an ingeniously contrived lightlessness comedy, turns its back on public to put one crossways us into a sepulchral netherworld of the playwrights imagination, in which deject surprises lurk around any narrative corner.

But stagily potent as it is, The Pillowman at last has as much to tell us about the darker passages of experience it purports to dramatize as the haunted-house tantalise down at Disneyland does. (Although it is a lot creepier.) That assessment sounds harsh, only Mr. McDonagh talent actually withstand with it. In a fresh interview, he told The New York propagation that he saw field of study as a misfortune to tell a story in, basically. From the plays thickets of morbid incident washbasin be extrapolated a annoying manifesto proclaiming meaninglessness as a prime virtuousness in entertainment: it is the art of storytelling itself, and not the story organism told, that Mr. McDonagh finds interesting. The surfeit of...If you want to conk out a full essay, rule it on our website: Orderessay

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