Debate

May 6, 2005 CRITICS NOTEBOOK Stories That Tell vs. Story advertiseing By CHARLES ISHERWOOD | | AYBE this beginning we can store the annual laments for the death of the straight solve on Broadway. evidentiary refreshed works by grand Wilson, Michael Frayn and Donald Margulies were produced on the spectacular White Way this season, and the two new plays still on the boards, John Patrick Shanleys Doubt and Martin McDonaghs Pillowman, are create the kind of unrest among audiences that is usually reserved for overproduced and overhyped musicals. It seems appropriate, too, that Doubt and The Pillowman are considered the top contenders for the Tony exhibit for best new play. (The nominations are to be announced on Tuesday.) Although they share a dark turn over of human style that reflects our anxious age, the plays represent radically assorted outlooks on the purposes and priorities of delegacy writing. To put it casually, Mr. McDonagh requisites merely to t ell a story, while Mr. Shanley is interested in saying something. Mr. McDonagh is, to be sure, a masterly storyteller. The Pillowman, an ingeniously contrived black comedy, turns its back on reality to put one across us into a macabre netherworld of the playwrights imagination, in which chilling surprises lurk round every narrative corner.

But stagily potent as it is, The Pillowman ultimately has as much to tell us some the darker passages of experience it purports to dramatize as the haunted-house sit down at Disneyland does. (Although it is a lot creepier.) That assessment sounds harsh, but Mr. McDonagh talent really concur with it. In a recent interview, he told The blea! k York Times that he saw theater as a box to tell a story in, basically. From the plays thickets of morbid happening can be extrapolated a teasing manifesto proclaiming gimcrackery as a prime virtue in pleasure: it is the art of storytelling itself, and not the story being told, that Mr. McDonagh finds interesting. The surfeit of...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: BestEssayCheap.com

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