Playwrights

The late Robert Altman, while he was making a movie of Sam Shepard's play "Fool for Love," tried to describe the piece to a reporter. "I'm not going to synopsize it," the director said. "It's not a story, and it's not an idea. It's a painting. It's about a place, it's about a culture, a time, relationships, people's awareness or unawareness of their own history. " Ed Harris was in the original production of "Fool for Love" at San Francisco's Magic Theatre in 1983, and now he is in a new play by Beth Henley, "The Jacksonian," about which Altman might have made the same observation.

As an East Coast "experimental" playwright, I'm often faced with disbelief when I tell my peers that I landed a staff job on NBC's new series "Smash. " Partially it's the strange-bedfellows notion of an allegedly avant-garde writer paired with a big, glitzy TV show about Broadway produced by Steven Spielberg. Even more prevalent, however, is the perception among theater folk that writing TV is slumming, or torturous, or at the very least a cynical sellout. It's a cliché, but it doesn't come from nowhere.

It's almost a rule of screwball comedy: The person you can't stand at first inevitably grows into a confidant or even a mate. Though they didn't become quite that friendly, playwright Molly Smith Metzler and one Martha's Vineyard trophy wife got close enough for comfort — and so simpatico that the woman became a major character in Smith Metzler's play, "Elemeno Pea," which opens Feb. 3 at South Coast Repertory. Smith Metzler, a middle-class native of sleepy Kingston, N.Y., had traveled to the Vineyard on a post-collegiate lark in the early aughts with the vague notion of gathering material for a newly hatched playwriting career.

What defines a political artist? Ideology? Activism? Revolutionary fervor? The question preoccupied me recently as I spent time rereading plays by Václav Havel, the dissident playwright turned Czech president, who died late last year. And the answer I discovered in "The Memorandum," "The Increased Difficulty of Concentration" and "Largo Desolato" had less to do with platforms and protests than I remembered. In fact, the only programmatic agenda I came upon was an unwavering defense of the individual, which just so happens to be the only agenda that will never grow obsolete.

Audiences who see Horton Foote's "Dividing the Estate," opening Thursday at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, will experience two hours of a family's comically desperate, talons-baring tussle over whether and how to cash out a 5,000-acre homestead in southeast Texas that's been passed down from generation to generation. But behind the scenes, the story line is just the opposite. There, the agenda is a family's unified, concord-filled effort to keep a theatrical legacy intact, celebrate it and carry it forward.

Sitting through a succession of new plays on a recent visit to New York, I was reminded of car trips as a child with my grandmother behind the wheel of her gigantic red Lincoln Continental. Her destination was clear, but her route, like those of the playwrights who were chauffeuring me around Broadway, was a guessing game. This was before the age of GPS, which would have been irrelevant for a fur-draped woman who relied on hunches rather than a map. (I recall one interminable journey to Atlantic City, N.J., that had me anxiously pointing out highway signs indicating we were headed elsewhere while she calmly applied another round of lipstick.)

Vaclav Havel, the former dissident playwright who led Czechoslovakia's 1989 "Velvet Revolution" against communism and then served as his country's president, died Sunday. He was 75. Havel, a former chain smoker with chronic respiratory problems, had been in failing health the past few months and died at his weekend home in Hradecek in the northern Czech Republic, his assistant, Sabina Tancevova, told the Associated Press. World leaders mourned his death. Lech Walesa, the former Polish president and Solidarity movement founder, called Havel "a great fighter for the freedom of nations and for democracy" whose "voice of wisdom will be missed.

Reporting from San Francisco -- Ebenezer Scrooge is a corporate banker, busy foreclosing on the hapless masses. Bob Cratchit and his beleaguered family live in a chilly tent in an anonymous Occupy encampment. The ghost of Christmas future sports a flowing black robe of taped-together trash bags and plastic sheeting. Tiny Tim dies. At least that's how the San Francisco Mime Troupe's resident playwright, Michael Gene Sullivan, has re-imagined "A Christmas Carol" for the troubled 21st century.

Yasmina Reza never planned to make a film of her international hit play "God of Carnage," a hair-trigger drama about a playground scuffle between two boys that escalates into a bitingly funny, primal struggle among their parents. But when a longtime friend proposed making a movie, the Paris-based playwright knew exactly the type of director the film needed: a master of macabre humor, an expert at raising the tension inside tight psychological spaces, a connoisseur of the darkest recesses of the human heart.

Lydia R. Diamond, whose plays often work the intersection of race and class, remembers once posing a hypothetical scenario she knew would prompt heated debate. The 42-year-old African American playwright and teacher contended that if the Obamas had a son and that son became the fiancé of somebody's white daughter, the young woman's family would not be happy, despite the breeding and connections. "My white friends would say, 'No, no, no, you're wrong! Class would trump race,'" she recalls.