Original title
American Playhouse
Released
1/12/1982
Origin country
US
Genre
Comedy, Drama
Status
Returning series
Number of seasons
13
Number of episodes
177
American Playhouse is an anthology television series periodically broadcast by Public Broadcasting Service in the United States.
From a short story by Kurt Vonnegut. Christopher Walken is a shy hardware store employee. But whenever he takes a part in a local amateur theater production, he becomes the part completely--while on screen. Susan Sarandon is new in town, a lonely itenerant telephone company employee. On a whim, she auditions for and gets the part of Stella to Walken's Stanley when the theater group does A Streetcar Named Desire. Before anyone realizes the problem, she falls deeply in love with the sexy brute, not knowing what the real man is like.
Mabel Lederer is a recently widowed woman who sells all her belongings and leaves her home to start a new life. Mabel believes she has powers to see into the future and to conduct seances. She changes her name to 'Angela Motorman' and moves into a boarding house where she interacts with the strange residents.
The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters is a 1982 comedy drama TV movie written by Jean Shepherd and directed by Richard Bartlett.
Weekend is a TV episode of American Playhouse directed by Paul Bogart.
The Skin of Our Teeth is the 1983 biographical drama TV episode of American Playhouse TV Series.
A young Depression-era reporter is assigned to write his newspaper's advice column on the insistence of his mocking editor. Unhappy in the demeaning assignment, he begins to take an interest in one of the readers sending letters.
A videotaped stage performance of Sam Shepard's play
Two young urban professionals, each with their own neuroses, make the fatal mistake one day of meeting by chance at an automatic bank teller machine and making a date for the movies.
City News is an independent, American comedy film, written and directed by David Fishelson and Zoe Zinman in New York City in 1983, which was nationally broadcast on PBS in 1984, exhibited theatrically in the U.S. and Canada in 1983, and selected for 12 international film festivals in 1983-4.
Solomon Northup's Odyssey, reissued as Half Slave, Half Free, is a 1984 American television film based on the autobiography Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. The film, which aired on PBS, was directed by Gordon Parks with Avery Brooks starring as the titular character. It was the second film to be funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, following Denmark Vesey's Rebellion in 1982. Parks returned to direct the film after years of absence. He chose to work in the Deep South and to collaborate with a crew of mixed races. The film first aired on PBS on December 10, 1984 and as part of PBS's American Playhouse anthology television series in the following year. It was released on video under the title Half Slave, Half Free.
The Joy that Kills is a 1984 television film adaptation of Kate Chopin's short story "The Story of an Hour." It was directed by Tina Rathborne and co-written by Rathbone and Nancy Dyer. It was released in 1984 as a part of the PBS series American Playhouse.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's comedy of a stylish young flapper (Sean Young) who chooses a husband (Lenny Von Dohlen), but finds she can't compete with his family.
In 1938 New York, a dentist finds his business failing and his marriage on the rocks. He is a hen-pecked husband with little drive left for success. That is, until he starts getting involved with his lively assistant, a free spirit with a penchant for tall tales and a hidden loneliness.
Charley Wyckham and Jack Chesney pressure fellow student Fancourt Babberly to pose as Charley's Brazilian Aunt Donna Lucia. Their purpose is to have a chaperone for their amorous visits with Amy and Kitty, niece and ward of crusty Stephen Spettigue. Complications begin when Fancourt, in drag, becomes the love object of old Spettigue and Sir Francis Chesney. - Written by Ed
Zoo attendant Artie Shaughnessy dreams of being a successful songwriter. What his mistress, Bunny Flingus, who lives downstairs from his Queens apartment won't tell him -- and what his insane wife, Bananas, tries to get through to him -- is that Artie's songs stink. On Oct. 4, 1965, the day Pope Paul visits New York City, Bunny convinces Artie to call his old school buddy Billy Einhorn, a famous film director from Los Angeles, to finagle a job writing music for Billy's movies. (After all, Bunny feels that with the Pope here, there must be "miracles in the air.") But ...
In an affluent area of downtown New York City, a Sunday evening dinner party is taking place. Hosted by Libby, an insecure thirty-something widow who lost her husband in an unfortunate accident, her guest of honor is downstairs neighbor Alice, a successful novelist, and Alice's lesbian lover, Boo, a family therapist. The other guests are Griever, Libby's best friend from group therapy; Norbert, Libby's gentle skydiving instructor; Tom, an old high-school boyfriend of Libby's now working as a jazz musician and composer, and Emily, Tom's current live-in girlfriend.
Fictionalized portrait of one of history's great literary couples: Stein & Toklas. Summer 1930s France, Alice tends to ailing Gertrude; they visit Fernande Olivier, Guillaume Apollinaire, others; and Hemingway pops in.
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