March 5-11 Page Three “New Generation" Plays on Festival '6l MONDAY NIGHT CBC-TV’s Fes- tival ’6l presents the North Ameri- can television premieres of two PETITE SINGER FLORENCE FAIERS is a hit with viewers young and one-act plays by two “new genera- old whenever she makes one of her frequent appearances on television. tion” playwrights: The Dumb After her recent performance on Music Break, she received this letter Waiter by Harold Pinter, who is from a very young swain who evidently had become more than impressed and The Zoo Story English, by with the pretty Miss: Edward Albee, who is American. Dear Miss Florense Pinter has been on the theatrical I saw you on TV today. I got chicken pops and they ich. scene for only about three years, Im small too but I will grow. Do you rely like that guy. Wendy but has established himself as an says she is my girl friend but shes not. I hope you dont get expert on the sinister, and writes, chicken pops. You dont get them from chickens. says one critic, with “a special Yours truly, brand of muted horror at the beast- Ricky Dixon. liness of being alive at all. The WHEN YOU SEE Riel on G.M. Presents next April, you can be sure effect of his plays is to make the that, besides having considerable dramatic impact, the play will be audience feel a good deal older authentic to the minute detail. Producer George McGowan, noted as a and very tired; to pick up its hat relentless perfectionist, recently spent several days in Winnipeg, search- from under the seat at the end ing through historical records in the provincial archives, the museums, with no certainty of what it will and the Archbishop’s Palace in St. Boniface. He was checking details in the darkness; find when it digs into the script, and gathering background information about the leader of the and at the same time to dissolve rebellion that churned Western Canada into a turmoil during the pioneer into anxious laughter at the extrava- era. gant realism of Mr. Pinter’s natural eccentricity.” The play will be presented in two 60-minute parts, on consecutive weeks. The first part concerns the Red River uprising, and the second. The Zoo Story is Albee’s first Riel’s return to Saskatchewan, his trial and his execution. play, and it first performed in was Written 12 years ago by Coulter, “Riel” has been produced suc- Berlin, on the same bill with John cessfully in Toronto and London, and was broadcast on CBC Wednesday Samuel Beckett’s Krapp's Last Night. Tape. Its author says the only reason for the German premiere George McGowan has been responsible for such successful plays in the was that a German producer was G.M. Presents series as The Big Deal, Slipknot, Collision, The Virtuous the first to like the play well enough Island, and Wind From the South. For First Person, he has produced to produce it. Albee’s illuminating, Venice Libretto, and The Heroes, and in the field of legitimate theatre, pithy dialogue had the critics’ ap- he has also been very active; at Stratford, he produced Henry TV, Part I, proval when The Zoo Story played three years ago, Othello in 1959, and the contemporary Canadian play. all over Germany, and its various Blind Mans Bluff, last year. performances in the have States WHATEVER HAPPENED to the Gypsies? Canada now has only 400 of been highly successful. the nomads, a small percentage of the 2,000,000 estimated to inhabit the roadways of the world. On Soundings Thursday, March 9 (CBC Radio) Romantic Myth many of this country’s Gypsies will be and their rich back- lively interviewed, “In the eighteenth century a ground of music and folklore will be explored. Some of the reasons for exchange between the artist and his their diminishing numbers will be brought to light, as well. public was still taken for granted. television wishing the best to noted Hogarth laughed at poets who lived THE CBC AND viewers, too, are in garrets and pursued their fancies; interviewer and personality Joyce Davidson, who is leaving Canada after he ridiculed musicians enraged by the five years of network telecasting to do a series of programs for Westing- popular music of the streets. The true house Broadcasting Co. in New York. artist was in contact with his public. The Romantics, however, introduced the fable that the poet dreaming in On Our Cover his garret, who writes only as the spirit moves him, is an image of the true poet; and although we know that Checkmates of Crime the image is largely false, it still CBC-TV’s newest mystery series is starring lingers in our imagination.” Edgar “Checkmate,” Wind, Professor of the History of Art Anthony George, Doug McClure and Sebastian Cabot. Cabot, in the University of Oxford and Fellow centre, plays a former criminology professor who helps McClure, of Trinity College, in his BBC Beith left, and George run their detective agency, Checkmate, Inc. Lectures on ‘Art and Anarchy’.