What's new? In Russia, it's "obscenities, drugs, and death"

From The Moscow Times:

Anton Chekhov parodied "The New Drama" (or at least its practitioners) in The Seagull, but that hasn't stopped new iterations of it showing up every generation or so in Russia. The latest, according to this overview, involves characters who are "bereft of principles, faith, taste, hope, conscience or ambition" and are "apt to have a proclivity for obscenities, drugs, and death." Which pretty much sounds like "New Drama" movements everywhere (see Mark Ravenhill and friends in Britain back in the late '90s).

 

Killers of Federico Garcia Lorca unmasked?

From The London Times:

It's a plot worthy of the playwright himself. Spanish filmmakers say they have cracked the mystery of who murdered that country's greatest playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca: his own family did it.

 

Playwright confounds expectations in "Mitzi's Abortion"

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Seattle playwright Elizabeth Heffron asked herself "What is the procedure you go through the night before you lose your kid?", and found that the answer is more Felliniesque than polemical.