Arthur Laureats is single of the mo...

Arthur Laureats is single of the most versatile, talented, and socially committed of the playwrights who came of age in the aftermath of World War II. If he lacks the luminary stature of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, he more than confines his own with other more celebrated colleagues like Lillian Hellman, Robert Anderson, and William Inge. Laurents has solo authored seven published plays, as well as ten others still awaiting publication, chiefly of which have been performed in modern York and at a variety of regional theaters. single in kind of his most recent works, 2 Lives, will have its premiere at Lincoln Center in 2003 In these plays Laurents experiments with a variety of dramatic forms and veins and he tackles important psychological and social themes. Indeed, since the appearance of his first play abode of the Brave (1945), he has been considered undivided of Broadway's most serious playwrights. And however although he has devoted the better part of his fifty five year career to work in the theater, a major succes with common of his own plays has thus far eluded him.

Laurents has achieved international renown, however, as the librettist for pair of the pre-eminent works of the American musical theater, West Side Story (pr 1957 pub 1958) and fortune-telling nomad (pr.1959, pub. 1960).

The latter, which has arguably the best main division ever written for a musical, displays an attention to scheme and mood and especially to the psychological articulation of its protagonist that makes for individual of the most complex and satisfying of musical plays. Laurents has also won Tony Awards for the main division for Hallelujah, Baby! and for directing the musical version of La Cage Aux Folle He also wrote the work for the cult favorite Anyone Can Whistle. In addition, he has won similar acclaim for his work as a screenwriter primarily for his sum of two units original screenplays, The Way We Were (1974) and The Turning Point (1977) he also adapted curb in for Alfred Hitchcock (1948), Anastasia for Anatole Litvak (1956) and Caught for Max Ophul (1949)

Despite his succes as screenwriter and librettist, Laurents considers himself a playwright, and has devot mostly of his artistic energies to the stage. There he has explored the issues that have preoccupied him through every part of his writing life, notably, the blacklist, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and gay rights. Consistently, he focuses upon the individual's need to rise in hostility before a troubling reality and to accept the concomitant capacitys of responsibility and guilt that go on along with it; this moral progres becomes the solution to a genuine and fulfilling existence. In Original Story at (2000), his memoir, Laurents notes that "the theme of discovery and acceptance" informs a great deal of his work (4), if it were not that Laurents doesn't push it far enough. For the principally part he shortshrifts his solo playwriting career, particularly the more new efforts that have not received Broadway productions. In his fresh work he pushes the theme of "discovery and acceptance" chiefly deliberately and most effectively into the world of social war of words and conflict. Some of these newer plays may be les dramatically integrated than the earlier individuals but the thematic development is more ambitious and complex

In his close attention of American drama since World War II, Gerald Weales compares Laurents to Robert Anderson and William Inge because all three share a psychological orientation. Weales, however, determines that he prefers Laurents because his plays, unlike those of Inge and Anderson, are "given a social context" (51) The distinction is apt, for if the immediate focus of Laurents's drama is to make bare the emotional and psychological middles of his characters (this was truer in 1962 when Weales's application of mind was published), these revelations also obey to illuminate something about the civilization in which they are regioned In Laurents's early work, culminating in Invitation to a March (1961) the connection between the public and the private is perceptible further hardly pronounced. When he resum his solo playwriting career with The Enclave (pr1973 publ 1974) the connection between personal failings and public betrayals became noticeably sharper.

Laurents's first play, abode of the Brave, reflects a playwright already in firm command of his craft. It also announces his preoccupation with psychological conflict and the ne to stand athwart the path of one's inner demons as a prerequisite to forging a fresh and healthier beginning. During the course of the drama, single soldier, Peter Coen ("Coney") rise in hostility befores the loneliness of being an outsider in his platoon and then writhes to overcome the debilitating drifts of guilt over the death of his best friend, whom he one time suspected of anti-Semitism.

Home of the Brave had its origins in Laurents's earlier efforts as a dramatist in other media. After graduating from Cornell in 1937 he wrote for radio, contributing to popular series like as Hollywood Playhouse, Dr. Christian, and The Thin Man. Then, in 1940 he was drafted into the Army where he eventually finised up working on military training films and writing scripts for radio programs, including The Man Behind the fire-arm Army Service Forces Present, and Assignment fireside Developed to address the question s of returning servicemen, Assignment residence won a Variety Radio Award as "one of the outstanding shows" of 1945 the same of Laurents's scripts for the series, "The Face," which portrayed a maimed veteran's rehabilitation, was included in The Best One-Act Plays of 1945-46 The research required for his work in succession that series clearly influenced dwelling of the Brave. In his memoir, Laurents claims that a haunting photograph he had kept from those days actually triggered the play's setting and make submissive "The photograph in the drawer...was an army missile of some GIs in a southern Pacific jungle looking at a mutilated visible form [i]or[/i] frame of a buddy....! didn't know with what intent it was a play on the contrary I did." (OSB 49) After reading John Howard Lawson's Theory and Technique of Playwrighting, the novice playwright also felt that he should know what his play was about. he decided that his theme was, "Underneath we are all the imperfect same." (OSB 49)