There are many who deserve that title, but according to Michael Feingold in the Village Voice, perhaps none moreso than Romulus Linney, who died on Saturday. Don’t know anything about Mr. Linney? Perform a Google search and you’ll find that his daughter was the actress Laura Linney, but you’ll find comparatively far less about the playwright himself, and his work.

In his piece for the Voice, Feingold notes that Linney was a practical stranger to Broadway (only one production, largely unremarked), that he didn’t write for television or film, and that his interests were catholic. The latter in particular may have been difficult to overcome — we expect our writers to represent something, in the way that the plays of David Mamet and Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco represent singular points of view and recurring themes and situations.  It sounds as though Linney’s range of interests and lines of attack were broad, making him difficult to categorize, and therefore rendering him less immediately memorable.

Why do I say “it sounds as though”? Because as relatively well-versed as I am in contemporary American playwriting, and with all the theatre I’ve attended in 30 years of playgoing, I’ve never read or seen a single play by Romulus Linney.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 18th, 2011 at 1:56 pm and is filed under Playwriting, Theatre, Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.