The 1974 comedy is about Arthur, a middle-aged, egotisticalhack writer who has been working on the opening line of a story involving a man's encounter with a squirrel for fifteen years, and Edmond, the young fledgling writer he has hired as a secretary/collaborator. They soon discover that Arthur's flamboyant redundancy clashes with Edmond's mediocre melodramatic style as they each develop increasingly ridiculous scenarios for the story. They are joined by Arthur's cleaning lady, also an aspiring writer, whose suggestions seem to be the most promising, but they too eventually bog down in banality.
In a modern sense, comedy refers to any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, television, film, stand-up comedy, or any other medium of entertainment. The origins of the term are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters. The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a dramatic performance which pits two groups or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old." A revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth is understood to be constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse in ruses which engender very dramatic irony which provokes laughter.
Egotism is the drive to maintain and enhance favorable views of oneself, and generally features an inflated opinion of one's personal features and importance. It often includes intellectual, physical, social and other overestimations.
A hack writer is a pejorative term for a writer who is paid to write low-quality, rushed articles or books "to order", often with a short deadline. In fiction writing, a hack writer is paid to quickly write sensational, "pulp" fiction such as "true crime" novels or "bodice ripping" paperbacks. In journalism, a hack writer is deemed to operate as a "mercenary" or "pen for hire", expressing their client's political opinions in pamphlets or newspaper articles. Hack writers are usually paid by the number of words in their book or article; as a result, hack writing has a reputation for quantity taking precedence over quality.
In October 1974 Mamet directed the first production of the play at the St. Nicholas Theater Company in Chicago, Illinois. "Squirrels" was produced by the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays, in January 1990, at the Harold Prince Theatre, Annenberg Center. The director was William H. Macy, who had performed in the Chicago production.
The British premiere was presented by The Mandrake Theatre Company at the Kings Head Theatre, London in 1993. Directed by Aaron Mullen. .
In more recent years it has been staged by the Philadelphia Fringe Festival , Upstairs at the Gatehouse in North London, and the Blue House Theatre Company and Criterion Theatre in Santa Monica.
North London is an informally and inexactly defined part of London, England which covers some of the area of the capital lying north of the River Thames. North London extends from Clerkenwell and Finsbury on the edge of the City of London financial district, to Greater London's boundary with Hertfordshire. The constituent districts were traditionally part of Middlesex with the exception of a small area around Barnet which was part of Hertfordshire.
A paperback, also known as a softcover or softback, is a type of book characterized by a thick paper or paperboard cover, and often held together with glue rather than stitches or staples. In contrast, hardcover or hardback books are bound with cardboard covered with cloth. The pages on the inside are made of paper.
Samuel French (1821–1898) was a U.S. entrepreneur who, together with British actor, playwright and theatrical manager Thomas Hailes Lacy, pioneered in the field of theatrical publishing and the licensing of plays.
The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier which is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency.
David Alan Mamet is an American playwright, film director, screenwriter and author. He won a Pulitzer Prize and received Tony nominations for his plays Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). He first gained critical acclaim for a trio of off-Broadway 70s plays: The Duck Variations,Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo. His plays Race and The Penitent, respectively, opened on Broadway in 2009 and previewed off-Broadway in 2017.
Joseph Anthony Mantegna is an American actor, producer, writer, and director.
Neil N. LaBute is an American playwright, film director, screenwriter, and actor. He is best-known for a play that he wrote and later adapted for film, In the Company of Men (1997), which won awards from the Sundance Film Festival, the Independent Spirit Awards, and the New York Film Critics Circle. He wrote and directed the films Your Friends & Neighbors (1998), Possession (2002), The Shape of Things (2003), The Wicker Man (2006), Some Velvet Morning (2013), and Dirty Weekend (2015). He directed the films Nurse Betty (2000), Lakeview Terrace (2008), and the American adaptation of Death at a Funeral (2010). LaBute created the TV series Billy & Billie, writing and directing all of the episodes. He is also the creator of the TV series Van Helsing and The I-Land. He also directed several episodes for shows such as Hell on Wheels and Billions.
Peer Gynt is a five-act play in verse by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen published in 1867. Written in Danish—the common written language of Denmark and Norway in Ibsen's lifetime—it is one of the most widely performed Norwegian plays. Ibsen believed Per Gynt, the Norwegian fairy tale on which the play is loosely based, to be rooted in fact, and several of the characters are modelled after Ibsen's own family, notably his parents Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg. He was also generally inspired by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen's collection of Norwegian fairy tales, published in 1845.
Michael Vivian Fyfe Pennington is a British actor, director and writer. Together with director Michael Bogdanov, he founded the English Shakespeare Company in 1986 and was its Joint Artistic Director until 1992. He has written ten books, directed in the UK, US, Romania and Japan, and is an Honorary Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Steppenwolf Theatre Company is a Chicago theatre company founded in 1974 by Terry Kinney, Jeff Perry, and Gary Sinise in the Unitarian church on Half Day Road in Deerfield and is now located in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood on Halsted Street. Its name comes from the novel Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse which original member Rick Argosh was reading during the company's inaugural production, And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, in January 1974.
Speed-the-Plow is a 1988 play by David Mamet that is a satirical dissection of the American movie business. As stated in The Producer's Perspective, "this is a theme Mamet would revisit in his later films Wag the Dog (1997) and State and Main (2000)". As quoted in The Producer's Perspective, Jack Kroll of Newsweek described Speed-the-Plow as "another tone poem by our nation's foremost master of the language of moral epilepsy."
American Buffalo is a 1975 play by American playwright David Mamet which had its premiere in a showcase production at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago. After two more showcase productions it opened on Broadway in 1977.
Sexual Perversity in Chicago is a play written by David Mamet that examines the sex lives of two men and two women in the 1970s. The play is filled with profanity and regional jargon that reflects the working-class language of Chicago. The characters' relationships come to be hindered by the caustic nature of their words, as much of the dialogue includes insults and arguments. The play presents "intimate relationships [as] minefields of buried fears and misunderstandings".
Vint is a short play by David Mamet, adapted from a short story by Anton Chekhov. The play was commissioned by The Acting Company and, along with six other commissioned plays, presented in 1986 as Orchards.
Atlantic Theater Company is an Off-Broadway non-profit theater, whose mission is to produce great plays "simply and truthfully utilizing an artistic ensemble." The company was founded in 1985 by David Mamet, William H. Macy, and 30 of their acting students from New York University, inspired by the historical examples of the Group Theatre and Stanislavski. Atlantic believes that the story of a play and the intent of its playwright are at the core of the creative process.
Stuart Gordon is an American filmmaker, theatre director, screenwriter, and playwright. Initially recognized for his provocative and frequently controversial work in experimental theatre, Gordon is perhaps more widely known for work in film. Most of Gordon's cinematic work is in the horror genre, though he has also ventured into science fiction and film noir. Like his friend and fellow filmmaker Brian Yuzna, Gordon is a fan of H. P. Lovecraft and has adapted several of the author's stories for the screen, including Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Dagon, as well as the Masters of Horror episode Dreams in the Witch-House.
Theater in Chicago describes not only theater performed in Chicago, Illinois but also to the movement in Chicago that saw a number of small, meagerly funded companies grow to institutions of national and international significance. Chicago had long been a popular destination for tours sent out from New York managements, as well as an origins of many shows sent to appear worldwide. According to Variety editor Gordon Cox, beside New York City, Chicago has one of the most lively theater scenes in the United States. In 2018, as many as 100 shows can be seen any given night from 200 companies, some with national reputations and many in creative "storefront" theaters, demonstrating a vibrant theater scene "from the ground up".
Edmond is a one-act play written by David Mamet. It premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, on June 4, 1982. The first New York production was October 27 of the same year, at the Provincetown Playhouse. The play consists of twenty-three short scenes. In the original production, each of the actors took on multiple roles, save the two playing Edmond and his wife. Kenneth Branagh starred as Edmond in a production of the play in London in 2003.
Mary Zimmerman is an American theatre and opera director and playwright from Nebraska. She is an ensemble member of the Lookingglass Theatre Company, the Manilow Resident Director at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, and also serves as the Jaharis Family Foundation Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
Gregory Mosher is a longtime director and producer of stage productions at the Lincoln Center and Goodman Theatres, on and off-Broadway, at the Royal National Theatre, and in the West End. He is also a film director and television director, producer, and writer. He currently chairs the Theatre Department at Hunter College.
Josie Rourke is an English theatre and film director. Since 2012, Rourke has been the artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse theatre in London.
Colin Stinton is a Canadian actor.
Frank Dunlop is a British theatre director.
Robert Falls is an American theater director and the current artistic director of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.
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