Witness | |
---|---|
Written by | Terrence McNally |
Date premiered | November 21, 1968 |
Place premiered | Off-Broadway |
Original language | English |
Genre | one-act play |
Witness is a one-act play by Terrence McNally which opened Off-Broadway at the Gramercy Arts Theatre on November 21, 1968, [1] and closed on January 26, 1969. [2]
Witness premiered Off-Broadway at the Gramercy Arts Theatre in 1968. It starred James Coco, Sally Kirkland, Richard Marr, and Joe Ponazecki, and was paired with another McNally play, Sweet Eros . The production ran through January 26, 1969. [3]
Witness is one of McNally's earlier plays and received mixed reviews. [4] [5]
The play depicts a man who is planning to assassinate the President of the United States from the window of a building, all the while keeping a gagged and bound victim as a witness to his sanity. [6] One of the play's major themes is loneliness. [5]
Terrence McNally was an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Described as "the bard of American theater" and "one of the greatest contemporary playwrights the theater world has yet produced," McNally was the recipient of five Tony Awards. He won the Tony Award for Best Play for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime, and received the 2019 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1996, and he also received the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 and the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2018, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest recognition of artistic merit in the United States. His other accolades included an Emmy Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, two Obie Awards, and three Hull-Warriner Awards.
James Emil Coco was an American stage and screen actor. He was the recipient of a Primetime Emmy Award, a Drama Desk Award, a Cable ACE Award and three Obie Awards, as well as nominations for a Tony Award, an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards. Coco is remembered for his supporting roles in the films Man of La Mancha (1972), Murder by Death (1976) and Only When I Laugh (1981).
Sweet Eros is a one-act, two-character play by Terrence McNally, which premiered Off-Broadway in 1968.
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The Madwoman of Chaillot is a play, a poetic satire, by French dramatist Jean Giraudoux, written in 1943 and first performed in 1945, after his death. The play is in two acts. The story concerns an eccentric woman who lives in Paris and her struggles against the straitlaced authority figures in her life.
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