Dear David Ives:
I attended a preview performance of your play \”Ancient History\” last Saturday (Sept. 11) at the Fountain Theatre, where a member of the production company announced that the play still needed \”tweaking,\” and so we should feel free to pass along our comments and suggestions.
The First Picture Show\” at the Taper Forum resembles the early silent movies whose creators the play celebrates — sometimes fuzzy, sometimes jerky, but moving the action, and the audience, right along.<
Harriet Tubman, the fugitive-slave andabolitionist, was a kind of African-American Mata Hari.
When Mendel Moscowitz is transported from Brooklyn to ancient Egypt, the juxtaposition of a whiny New Yorker on the eve of the Exodus is supposed to create the setting for campy high jinks and musical hilarity.
Donald Freed is a rarity among playwrights: He is primarily an ideologue who, instead of producing documentary films or constructing journalistic accounts of the \”truth\” behind the news headlines, writes plays.
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