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A M E R I C A N C O N S E R V AT O R Y T H E AT E R
Carey Perloff, Artistic Director Heather Kitchen, Executive Director
PRESENTS
Rich and Famous
by john guare
directed by john rando
american conservatory theater
january 8–february 8, 2009
WORDS ON PLAYS
prepared by
elizabeth brodersen
publications editor
michael paller
resident dramaturg
dan rubin
publications & literary associate
lesley gibson
publications intern
megan cohen
dramaturgy intern
a.c.t. is supported in part by the Grants for the Arts/San
Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, the National
Endowment for the
Arts, and the donors
of The Next Generation
Campaign.
© 2009 American Conservatory theater, a nonprofit organization. All rights reserved.
table of contents
.
Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of Rich and Famous
Rich and Famous Meet and Greet / Design Presentation
A Brief Biography of the Playwright
Becoming Rich and Famous
by John Guare
The Thrill of the Play: An Interview with John Guare
by Dan Rubin
Hello from “Lower Death Street”: The World of Off-Off Broadway
by Megan Cohen
. The Worst of Times in Times Square
.
Blaze of Glory
by Lesley Gibson
A Short History of the Etruscan People
by Robert Guisepi
A Rich and Famous Glossary
by Megan Cohen
. Questions to Consider
. For Further Information . . .
OPPOSITE Sketch of Bing Ringling by costume designer Gregory Gale
Sketch of the billboard for Rich and Famous by scenic designer Scott Bradley
characters, cast, and synopsis of
RICH AND FAMOUS
Rich and Famous, directed by Mel Shapiro, was first presented in New York City by the
New York Shakespeare Festival at The Public Theater, February . An earlier version of the play was produced by William Gardiner and the Academy Festival Theatre
in Lake Forest, Illinois, August characters and cast
bing ringling
leanara, veronica gulpp-vestige, allison, mom
stage manager, anatol torah, dad, tybalt dunleavy
aphro, francis, hare krishna
Brooks Ashmanskas
Mary Birdsong
Stephen DeRosa
Gregory Wallace
the setting
New York City, the H.
synopsis
S
cene i. A Manhattan street corner. As playwright Bing Ringling walks to the theater
on the opening night of his latest play, he sings of how the angels promised him a
life of wealth and fame. He is joined by his girlfriend, Leanara, an actress who stars in
his play. The semiautobiographical Etruscan Conundrum is the th play Bing has written, but the first to be produced. Leanara presents him with a gift: two pairs of cuff links.
One pair bears the initial r, the other, the initial f, representing “rich” and “famous.” Bing
fears that the show will be a flop and that he will forever be the “World’s Oldest Living
Promising Young Playwright,” but Leanara assures him it will succeed. She tells Bing of
her fantasy of starring in a hit play and marrying the playwright on opening night, but he
grows uncomfortable and tells her he doesn’t want to be tied down. When she threatens to
leave the production, he embraces and serenades her. At her request he then triumphantly
performs her favorite monologue from the play—an homage to the Etruscans, a people
who vanished but dance eternally on the painted pots they left behind.
As they continue their walk, Bing notices a billboard above Times Square that advertises Gangland, a film starring his closest childhood friend, the popular movie actor Tybalt
Dunleavy. He laments the success of his boyhood friend in comparison to his own humble
situation.
scene ii. Off Broadway. Backstage at the theater. Bing and Leanara sing about success,
and Aphro, the lead actor in Bing’s play, joins in. The stage manager gives them their cues,
and they take to the stage. Aphro begins the monologue about the Etruscans. As Bing
nervously watches backstage, Aphro breathlessly runs over to him. He tells Bing that, as
he was marching through the audience during the play’s processional, none other than
Tybalt Dunleavy, who was sitting in the second row, pressed a note addressed to Bing into
his hand. Aphro leaves.
Bing reads the note: Tybalt suggests that Aphro is wrong for the part and tells Bing that
he should have asked him to appear in the play. He says he hopes they can work together
someday, and invites Bing to call on him at the Algonquin Hotel. Bing is overjoyed and
excitedly declares his master plan to stun mankind with the glory of his art.
Bing’s producer, the legendary Broadway hit maker Veronica Gulpp-Vestige, enters and
greets him warmly. Bing tells her that Tybalt Dunleavy wants a part in the play and suggests that, with Tybalt in the leading role, they could transfer the production to Broadway.
Veronica sits Bing down and tells him the reason she chose to produce his play: already
possessing massive wealth and success, the only thing she lacks in life is a comeback. By
producing his play, she would, for the first time, attach her name to a major flop, thus setting herself up for a triumphant return. She casually tells him that she already sent Tybalt
away from the theater and elaborates on her long-term plan of creating flop after flop with
Bing until their names are “synonyms for stupidity,” before staging a grand comeback by
producing a Nobel Prize–winning hit.
Bing panics and runs to the phone to call the Algonquin. He leaves a frantic message
for Tybalt that he would love for him to do The Etruscan Conundrum. He is interrupted
when Leanara returns from the stage in a daze; while she was onstage she froze and forgot
all of her lines. She tries to tell Bing not to worry and reminds him that “My Fair Lady
was a famous disaster on opening night,” but he dashes out of the theater and runs to the
Algonquin Hotel.
scene iii. That same night. Outside the Algonquin Hotel. Bing stands outside the hotel
and is approached by a hooker, who turns out to be Aphro. Aphro reveals that prostitution
is his job between acting gigs and that after the failure of that night’s performance he came
down to the Algonquin to find Tybalt in the hope that he might land a film deal. Bing tells
Aphro that Tybalt won’t be doing any films for a while—he’ll be taking over Aphro’s role
in The Etruscan Conundrum. Aphro lunges at Bing and the two begin to fight, but they
are distracted when a bundle of newspapers with the first reviews of the play lands nearby.
They take turns reading the reviews to each other. They are universally terrible.
Aphro is only momentarily bummed and resolves to return to prostitution. Before he
exits, he tells Bing not to be too depressed and reminds him that he still has his musical
collaboration with Anatol Torah to look forward to. As Bing runs off to telephone the
Algonquin in search of Tybalt again, Veronica drifts onstage in a state of shock, trailing the
terrible reviews behind her. Meanwhile, Bing learns that Tybalt has checked out and left
no forwarding address. The scene ends as Veronica climbs into a garbage can and sings a
song about Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Moscow, and failed dreams. Bing leaves.
scene iv. Manhattan. Anatol Torah's apartment. Bing arrives at the fabulous pink-andwhite residence of the eccentric composer Anatol Torah. Anatol asks Bing to regale him
with the story of the musical they are working on together. Bing begins to tell the tale of
The Odiad, a modernized hybrid of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Anatol is so moved he begins
singing his own kooky compositions and thanks Bing for reawakening his creativity.
The two trade compliments: Bing tells Anatol that he admires his devotion to art and
declares him his hero. Anatol tells Bing that he knows about the bad reviews for The
Etruscan Conundrum but maintains that Bing is still his muse, that they are mirrors of
each other. He presents Bing with the contract for their upcoming collaboration. In their
mutual excitement, Bing calls Leanara, but she tells him that she was discovered that very
night and offered a job on a tv series in California; she is leaving him.
Anatol says good riddance to the baggage of Bing’s failed play and failed relationship;
he even goes so far as to sabotage Bing’s day job at a restaurant by lying to the Board of
Health. He then asks Bing to make a call for him. Earlier that night, Anatol met Tybalt
Dunleavy, his “spiritual double,” in a bar. When Anatol discovered that Tybalt and Bing
had been childhood friends, he immediately pleaded with him to play Ulysses in The
Odiad, but Tybalt turned him down, insisting that if he were to appear in anything, it
would be The Etruscan Conundrum. Intrigued that Tybalt is a bigger star than himself,
Anatol demands that Bing convince him to appear in The Odiad. He then tells Bing to
look more closely at the contract. It states that without Tybalt, Bing is of no use to Anatol;
no Tybalt, no musical. Robbed of his last chance for artistic success, Bing throws the contract down and exits.
scene v. Later that night. An art gallery. Looking for a place to clear his head, Bing
enters an art gallery, which is empty but for a young woman. She begins to speak to Bing
with familiarity; he doesn’t at first recognize her, but gradually realizes that she is Allison,
his former girlfriend, whom he left years ago on the advice of a preacher, after a teen-aged
pregnancy scare. The gallery is showcasing one of her grandfather’s paintings, and her
husband can be heard fighting with the agents in a back room to ensure that Allison gets
a share of the profits.
Allison explains that, just before Bing arrived, she had been walking around inside the
painting. She then demonstrates in order to escape her husband’s screaming. She invites Bing
to join her inside the painting; it is their past, she says. She sings to Bing that she envisions
them spending eternity together. He tries to convince her to step out of the painting, but she
explains that she is scared of her husband and of life, and that living in the painting makes
her feel safe. Eventually Bing persuades her to leave the painting. As her husband calls her
offstage, she tells Bing to write about her and sings a song about eternity.
interlude. Later that night. The streets of Manhattan. A Hare Krishna boy dances onto
the stage. He requests that Bing allow him to read from the Bhagavad Gita. Bing shoos
him away, saying he just wants to go home.
scene vi. The Bronx. The home of Bing’s parents. Bing steps into his parents’ living room.
His parents are both asleep, dressed to attend the premiere of his play (though he never
invited them). Upon his entrance, they awaken and begin to baby him and celebrate his
success. He tries to tell them about his failure, but they refuse to listen and instead shower
him with compliments. Bing questions his profession and asks his parents why they had
to put so much pressure on him to be great. More than anything, he says, he wants to see
life as it really is, not through the lens of dreams—his own or anyone else’s. His mother
replies that they absolutely adore him—so much so that they had each of his dirty diapers
bronzed, bottled his bathwater in Mason jars, and never
flushed his tinkle from the toilet. They lament that he has
grown up and left their house, and Bing’s father speaks
jealously of the neighbors whose developmentally disabled middle-aged son still lives with them.
Bing breaks the news to his parents that his play might
not be very good. His parents are aghast and take his failure as a personal insult. His father starts hurling obscenities at him, and, after Bing presents the bad reviews, he
pulls out a gun and fires at his son.
Bing apologizes for his shortcomings. He tells them
that they should have had Tybalt for a son, and they proceed to paint a picture of how wonderful their life would
be as Tybalt’s parents. They pull out the sofa bed and
climb in. Bing takes the gun and shoots his parents pointblank, but they don’t die. His dad explains, “They don’t
give Pulitzer Prizes to boys who kill their parents.”
Sketch of Bing’s mother by costume designer Gregory Gale
Bing climbs into bed with his parents and explains why his play failed, and then says
that he wants them out of his life. They ignore him completely. He crawls out of bed as
they congratulate themselves on their wonderful son, Tybalt.
interlude. A Manhattan street corner. Bing finds himself back on the street, standing
under the Gangland billboard in Times Square. He sings a song from his youth—“I found
a penny / a shiny shiny penny / and I’m on my way!” He looks up at Tybalt’s picture and
declares that he wants to “see life through Tybalt’s eyes.” He climbs up to the scaffolding
in front of the billboard. As the wind blows him around, he notices another man on the
scaffolding—Tybalt Dunleavy.
scene vii. The scaffolding of the billboard. Bing and Tybalt are surprised to see each other.
Tybalt is suspicious of Bing’s sudden appearance, and cryptically asks him, “Did they send
you up here. . . .They haven’t changed the plan, have they?” He then tells Bing that if he
had known his old friend wanted to be rich and famous he would have helped him, and
confesses that he, too, had the r and f cufflinks, but he returned them before climbing
up to the billboard. He laments that he is no longer in a position to help his old friend.
He explains to Bing that he has climbed to the top of the billboard with the intention of
jumping because he has sold the rights to his death to a group of lawyers and agents, convinced that dying young like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe is the only way to protect
his legacy. In death he will become a multimillion dollar industry—he has posed nude for
photographs, written a book of hopes and dreams, and filmed unseen movie scenes, all of
which will be released after his suicide. In a few moments, he says, his leap from the scaffolding will be filmed by hidden cameras.
Bing attempts to persuade Tybalt to reconsider, to imagine a new life for himself. But
Tybalt explains that it wouldn’t “fit the legend” and that the plan is already too far along
to stop now; he throws himself from the billboard as hundreds of adoring fans who have
just seen Gangland stream out of the cinema below.
The scene unwinds surreally. An actress appears, dressed as Bing, and sings of lost hope,
shattered dreams, and the broken promise of the angels Bing sang about in the opening
number. She is joined by Bing and an actor, who is also dressed as Bing. The three mirror
each other’s movements, and the song ends with the question, “When will life be the way
I want it to be?”
The actor and actress ask, “Hey, Bing, what are you going to do now?” In reply, Bing
removes a cuff link and throws it aside. His counterparts follow suit. Try as he might,
however, he cannot remove the other cuff link.
RICH AND FAMOUS meet
and greet /
design presentation
Remarks Made to a.c.t. Staff and the Cast of Rich and Famous, December O
n the first day of rehearsal of each production, a.c.t. staff members and the show’s
cast and creative team gather in a studio to meet, mingle, and get to know each
other. After personal introductions are made, the director and designers present to the
assembled group their vision for the design of the production, which is typically the culmination of months of research, discussion, and textual analysis. This introduction is a kind
of “snapshot” of the creative team’s understanding of the world of the play at the moment
they step into the room with the actors, an understanding that will evolve and grow and
perhaps change in significant ways as the cast brings life and breath and physical action to
the playwright’s words over the following four weeks of rehearsal.
Below are excerpts from remarks made at the first rehearsal of Rich and Famous at a.c.t.,
a glimpse into the initial impulses behind the look and feel of the upcoming production.
a.c.t. executive director
heather kitchen
We are delighted to have this fantastic play
and wonderful director and cast here at
a.c.t. We have all been looking forward to
this for months, and it’s great to welcome
back John Rando, who was most recently
here with Urinetown, The Musical, which
was one of our all-time favorites and went
on to a fantastic tour. And so I will turn it
over to, you, John.
director john rando
It’s extraordinary that, on the first day of
rehearsal, we have all of the designers here
under the same roof. I was a little floored
when I heard they were all coming in. But
then I figured, “Well, it’s San Francisco. I
understand why they’re here.”
Sketch of Aphro in The Etruscan Conundrum by costume
designer Gregory Gale
Urinetown had been done before and I was very proud that we were at a.c.t. as the
launching point for the tour. But the idea of doing Rich and Famous here, this is the real
honor, because this is actually an a.c.t. production.
As a young artist, when you looked at our country and you picked a theater that you
dreamed about working in, it was really a short list. a.c.t. was a place that was so high on
my list that it’s a dream come true to be working here now. I bring that up because when
I was growing up in Houston, Texas, I sat in front of my television set in high school, late
high school (okay, maybe it was college), and I watched a pbs production of The Taming of
the Shrew that William Ball had done with Ralph Funicello’s set design and the extraordinary acting company that was at a.c.t. You see something like that and you say, “Oh my
God: that is what I want to be a part of.” That is a very good dream to have. This institution represents that for the United States. It’s a formidable place to be. Those of us who
traveled in from that “other” city [New York] are very humbled and happy and honored
to be here.
[a.c.t. Artistic Director] Carey [Perloff ] and I have been talking about my coming
back here, and there were a couple times when it was going to happen. But here’s how it
finally worked out: I looked at my calendar
and I didn’t have any work, so I called Carey
Perloff: “Carey, I have to come to work for
you! Come on! Let’s do something here!” See,
actors get to audition and get reputations, but
directors have a little bit harder time getting
work. So I called Carey, and she said, “Well
you know, we need a funny play, and you’re
kind of funny. And it has to be a small cast.” I
said, “I have no idea.” But then a dear friend
[a.c.t. Dramaturg Michael Paller] is working
here, reading plays and doing the dramaturgy
for this theater, and we’ve known each other
for a very long time. His faith in the American
theater and in playwriting is so astounding.
Michael had this wacky idea of doing this
John Guare play, Rich and Famous.
For those of us who grew up in the ’s and
in the American theater and were interested
Sketch of Veronica Gulpp-Vestige by costume designer
in playwriting—which was sort of an obscure
Gregory Gale
thing to be doing as a young adult—and would go to acting classes and do the one-act
play competitions and all that, Rich and Famous was one of those plays that you looked at
to get a scene from, to get a monologue from. It became a kind of ground base for a lot of
us who grew up at that time in terms of the material we would choose to do to develop
ourselves as artists. So for me the chance to actually get to do this play is an extraordinary
thing and a personal triumph and thrill.
I haven’t had, nor did I ever dream that I would have, the opportunity to work with
John Guare. John is an icon of our theater and, obviously, an extraordinary writer, and on
his behalf I wanted to tell you that he is so thrilled that we are doing this play, which has
become somewhat neglected in the canon of American theater. Personally this makes me
very proud of what we are trying to do here with this play. It’s a very interesting play for
our time, especially with the economic crunch that everyone is feeling, so there are a lot of
good reasons to be at work on this, besides its being a small-cast/funny play.
I want to talk a bit about the design and the designers. We had a very difficult time
figuring out this play. The interesting thing is that the play hadn’t been fully produced even
when John Guare did it [–]. It was done at the Public, and before that it was done at
a little summer theater, but it had a kind of bumpy beginning: Linda Lavin was one of the
original cast members, and then right when they went into rehearsal, literally the week of
the first rehearsals, she stepped out of the rehearsal hall, took a phone call, came back, and
said, “I just got a job in l.a. I have to leave the show.” It was this little television show [cbs’s
Alice] that went on to make her an enormous life and fortune. John is so thrilled that we
are doing this play again partly because of that, the strange birth the show had originally.
That got me to think a lot about the show, and when [set designer] Scott Bradley and I
talked, one thing we didn’t talk about initially was the theater. When we first talked about
the play, I kept thinking that we’d do it all in this little snow globe of New York City.
Well, that was just a bad idea. [Laughter] Horrible, horrible idea. Why? I started thinking
about what John had originally intended: We in the theater, both in terms of the people
who act and the people who direct—the artists—as well as the people who make theater
happen (producers), we all have this dream that we can do our craft and the craft can be
supported, and appreciated, and loved. We have this little dream every single time we do
a play. Then it happens. We do the play, and often that dream gets hit over the head with
a mallet or a hammer and gets crushed. It gets shattered, and we are left to pick up the
pieces. Rich and Famous seems to be asking that question over and over again: What is
the dream of theater? What is the dream of performance? How is it personal, how does it
thrive, and how is it irrepressible? These are important questions for us, because any time
Set model for Rich and Famous by scenic designer Scott Bradley
you do a play, no matter what it is, it is an insane life we live. This is therefore a very fun
play with great conflict.
So then we started to talk about the theater, we started to talk about Lower Death
Street and off Broadway, and then Scott came up with this very magical design idea that
would make us think about that throughout. So, Scott, maybe if you could just talk us
through the model.
scenic designer scott bradley
Taking off on that idea of off Broadway, when the curtain goes up we’re backstage and
we see this loading-dock door. Mostly, the scenery is revealed by the door rising up, and
we see this whole set, which is rather painterly. We see this lovely view of Times Square
through this off-Broadway backstage view. You’re always getting this dreamlike, framed
quality of Broadway. Meanwhile, everything that is used in the play is somehow or another
peripheral or in view. It’s very backstage-y: there’s this scaffolding above and this hanging,
looming frame, which I’ll use later on to exploit certain scenes.
So we’re backstage in the backstage scene, and then the Algonquin Hotel comes on, and
the underside of the frame has lights on it so that you get the sense of signage, but it is
still impressionistic. That is the only lettering in the show: “The Algonquin Hotel.” Rather
than reproducing all the signage of Times Square, it is like an impressionistic painting.
Some of it is taken from ’s artists like Peter Max, as far as the color palette. We thought
it would be a perfect show to do a variety of color, like the pink room for Anatol. Later,
the parents’ home will be created in a monochromatic green, with the fold-out sofa bed,
which Bing shoots his parents on.
There is this other magical moment when they go into the painting gallery. John
Guare’s intentions were quite romantic. The artist [whose work is showing at the gallery]
was very much in the style of William Merritt Chase, of the impressionistic Hudson River
school of painting; it’s a very bucolic, pastoral painting that is literally stepped into. This
looming frame that was overhead is magically released, and it comes down and frames the
painting, then flies away.
I didn’t mention the part about Tybalt and his big billboard sign: in doing a bunch of
research on movie posters, John really favored this old Al Pacino Serpico movie that had
this brilliant graphic portrayal of Pacino’s face. So this [Bradley indicates billboard on set
model] is Stephen DeRosa . . .
stephen derosa: With a lot of prosthetics and a wig! [Laughter]
scott bradley: . . . and it is very purple and yellow. At the end of the play, Tybalt and
Bing are caught on this scaffolding in front of the billboard. A giant fraction of the previous
billboard flies in, and there
is a little door in the eyeball,
so they enter through the
eyeball. The scaffolding is
on a teeter-totter, so when
they’re on one end it will
slowly start tilting, and
then they will run over to
the other end to try and
balance. The whole scene
is a play on a balancing act.
Then Tybalt jumps off to
his death. John [Rando]
had this great idea that was
simple and theatrical: Tybalt
will dive off the scaffolding onto this invisible ironing board–shaped object, so that he is lying
flat on it. Underneath will be this omnipresent grating in the floor, like a sewer grating or a
subway grating, from which a giant fan blows up, so it looks like he is falling in midair—the
wind is blowing him and his tie goes up. Meanwhile the billboard and the scaffolding slowly
rise out of sight, so it looks like he’s falling. And then the play is over with.
This is our beautiful little entrance doorway, which is a telephone booth. There are all
these telephones in the play—at Anatol’s, and on the street, and backstage—and we need
a door to enter through for certain scenes, so sometimes the characters will enter a room
through the telephone booth. Sometimes they will even use it as a changing booth. There
will be window shades so they can change inside.
I’m sure I missed a couple things. [This set] is chock full of little toys and theatrical
effects that will make it a fun evening.
on the costumes
john rando: One of the things that [costume designer] Gregory [Gale] and I spoke
about, well really all of us spoke about, was that the period of – is very important. I
really wanted to not hide that and to celebrate the ’s, so that when we see this play we’re
seeing it through another lens than audiences saw it originally. The tone and the quality
and the thoughts in the play are inherently of their time, and therefore better for a contemporary audience, in a strange way. This play wouldn’t necessarily be written today, although
it has strong resonance—no doubt about that. Frankly, I think the ’s are very funny, and
whacked, and great. Any time we can poke fun at them or celebrate them, we should.
When we talked about the clothing, I insisted that we celebrate that time and that
world. This makes Bing Ringling’s dream very specific: he’s trying to do a play off-off
Broadway, which doesn’t exist now the way it did back then.
gregory gale: Knowing John [Rando] and his sense of humor, if we believe that these
characters are based in reality, and give a grittiness and realness to the costumes, then the
writing and the actors can be really funny. We are not doing comic costumes. We are not
trying to make it funny; there is enough funniness in the ’s already. If we do it—point
blank—what it really was, that’s plenty.
OPPOSITE Front elevation of Times Square for Rich and Famous by set designer Scott Bradley
a brief biography of the playwright
J
ohn Guare was born in and educated at Georgetown and Yale universities. His
plays include To Wally Pantoni, We Leave a Credenza (), his off-off-Broadway debut;
Muzeeka (, obie Award), his breakthrough play; Cop-Out (); The House of Blue
Leaves (, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play; revival,
four Tony Awards); Two Gentlemen of Verona (); Marco Polo Sings a Solo (); Rich and
Famous (); Landscape of the Body (); Bosoms and Neglect (); Moon Over Miami
(); Six Degrees of Separation (, obie Award, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award,
Olivier Award for Best Play), which became a film in ; Four Baboons Adoring the Sun
(, Tony nomination for Best Play); Lake Hollywood (); Chaucer in Rome (); A
Few Stout Individuals (); and an adaptation of His Girl Friday, which premiered to
great acclaim at London’s National Theatre in . Guare’s series of plays on th-century
America—Gardenia (), Lydie Breeze (), and Women and Water ()—have been
performed in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, dc, London,
and Australia. His libretto (written with Mel Shapiro) for Two Gentlemen of Verona ()
won a Tony Award; the musical itself won the Tony and New York Drama Critics’ Circle
awards for best musical in . He collaborated with Czech director Milos Forman on the
screenplay Taking Off (), which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. His
screenplay Atlantic City (), directed by Louis Malle, won the New York, Los Angeles,
and National Film Critics’ Circle awards for best screenplay and was nominated for an
Academy Award. His narration for Psyche, a tone poem by César Franck, premiered at
Avery Fisher Hall in , conducted by Kurt Masur with the New York Philharmonic.
Guare was a founding member in of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National
Playwrights Conference and in was resident playwright at the New York Shakespeare
Festival. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in and to
the Theater Hall of Fame in . The Signature Theatre Company in New York City
honored Guare by devoting its – season to his plays. He received the New York
State Governor’s Arts Award in and the Gold Medal in Drama from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters in , and an obie Award for Sustained Achievement in
. He has served as a trustee of the pen American Center, co-edits the Lincoln Center
Theater Review, teaches playwriting at Yale School of Drama, and is a council member of
the Dramatists Guild of America. He lives in New York and Rome with his wife, Adele
Chatfield-Taylor, who is president of the American Academy in Rome.
Photo of John Guare by Paul Kolnik
becoming RICH AND FAMOUS
by john guare
W
hen you’re young, life is this joyous deck of cards flung up into a high wind. All
random. Who will I love? Where will I end up? What’s my story? That’s the
magic.
In , I was years old with a master’s from Yale that told me I was a playwright. I
knew everything about plays. I just didn’t have anything to write about. How could I? I
had been in school for years. I had served six months in the Air Force Reserve. I had
never lived life. I had no fingerprints.
In , determined to correct that, I flung my deck of cards in the air and went to
Europe to find the subject I knew was waiting for me. I armed myself with the thumb of
chance and started hitching. I wanted to be the kind of guy who’d have “care of American
Express, Cairo, Egypt” for an address. That’s what I gave my family and friends. Was there
even an American Express in Cairo?
The day I got to Rome was the day the pope spoke at Yankee Stadium to bring peace
to the world. All the papers featured shots of the pope in places I had fled, like Queens
Boulevard. I wandered around Rome. No future here. I got caught in a rainstorm and
found refuge in a museum dedicated to Etruscans. I spent hours in that weird place looking at pots of a vanished tribe that appeared to have danced themselves into oblivion. I
liked that. I wrote a riff about them. The rain cleared. I stuck out my thumb.
Six weeks later, I was in Cairo in a bar. The paper placemat has questions in English.
“Name the largest city in Africa.” I think, “Johannesburg? Nairobi?” I turn the placemat
over. Cairo is the answer? I am in Africa?
There was an American Express in Cairo. I found an annoyed and passionate letter
from my parents boasting that, while I was off seeing the world, the world came to them.
The pope whizzed by them this close on his way to Yankee Stadium. They poured out their
hearts about what that day promised them and the ramifications of what I had missed. I
saw a side of them I had never seen. Formerly valueless memories popped. Had I come all
this way to find my subject? I started writing The House of Blue Leaves that day in Cairo.
By August , I was back in America. We did a reading of the first act of Blue Leaves
at the newly founded Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. It went
over terrifically. People in the audience gave me a grant to become a fellow at Yale along
with four other young playwrights such as Sam Shepard and Barbara Garson, who had
(L to R) Barrie Chase, Philip Proctor, and Wallace Chappell in Muzeeka at the Mark Taper Forum in 1968. Photo by Steven Keull,
courtesy Center Theatre Group.
written a scandalous play called MacBird about lbj plotting to kill jfk. We were given
$, the use of a camera. We would spend the year learning how to make movies.
Forget that. I would use the time to write the second act of Blue Leaves. Two friends,
Warren Lyons and Betty Ann Besch, optioned it to produce in New York. While I knew
what the events had to be, I didn’t have the technical skill to handle nine people onstage.
I promised them I would deliver.
Yale that year was miraculous. Robert Brustein had shaken up the moribund drama
school by bringing in the great poet Robert Lowell, whose new play would be directed
by Jonathan Miller and star Irene Worth. Linda Lavin appeared in an opera by William
Bolcom and Arnold Weinstein called Dynamite Tonight. A young actor named Ron
Leibman was in a dazzling production of Volpone.
I looked at Yale seniors about to graduate knowing that they would be drafted and sent
off to this bloody Asian quagmire that the pope had not managed to prevent. I wrote a
play about a Yale man and how Vietnam would change his path.
Philip Proctor in Muzeeka. Photo by Steve Keull, courtesy Center Theatre Group.
I couldn’t figure out how to begin it. I went to my parents’ apartment to dump my
winter clothes. In some unopened suitcase, I found that notebook from my hitchhiking
trip containing a speech about Etruscans. It ended at the exact same place where my new
play began. In some unknown chamber of my mind, I had been working on this play for
the last couple of years. I learned that was what a writer’s life was—living a life where
you’d be ready to catch it when it came. But the unconscious wouldn’t reveal itself if you
sat around waiting for it. This new play would be called Muzeeka. We did it in July ,
at the O’Neill. People from the newly opened Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles saw it
and produced it there to ravishing reviews.
Warren and Betty Ann wanted to know the state of act two of Blue Leaves. “It’s
coming.”
Back in New York, the Mark Taper Forum forwarded me a Western Union telegram
from Jerome Robbins, the choreographer and director of West Side Story, saying he had
read Muzeeka. If I was ever in New York he would love to meet with me. He included his
number. I picked up the phone and dialed. Mr. Robbins answered. I blurted out, “I live in
New York!”
We met that day in February at Peter MacManus’s bar on West th St. Jerry had
started a workshop called the American Lyric Theater Workshop. He and a chosen group
of actors were developing exercises for a new form of theater. Jerry wanted a playwright
to weave these exercises into a dramatic piece. Would I? I was and working with Jerry
Robbins.
The work Jerry was creating was fascinating, but I had no idea how to make a play out
of this material. Jerry then gave me a one-act play by Brecht called The Exception and the
Rule. Could I find a way to turn it into a musical?
Brecht’s play dealt with a capitalist merchant crossing a desert with a coolie, whom
he murders. His defense at the trial is he treated the coolie so horribly that he had every
reason to think that the coolie would kill him in revenge so he killed him first. Justifiable
homicide was the verdict. The merchant was free. Jerry thought of Zero Mostel and
Richard Pryor as the merchant and coolie.
I thought that in this time of racial unrest and assassinations, a group of artists would
organize a benefit to promote racial harmony. This play would be part of the celebration,
like the pope coming to Yankee Stadium to bring peace to the world, only with Brecht
instead of His Holiness.
I imagined the theater transformed into a tv studio for a live performance of the play.
All the tensions of the play would spill over into the real lives of the actors involved in the
benefit performance. It would all end in disaster.
Leonard Bernstein loved it and wanted to write the music, but only if Stephen
Sondheim would do the lyrics. I went to Jerry’s house to meet Steve and convince him to
work solely as a lyricist this one last time. Jerry showed me into his living room and said,
“John, this is Steve.” He shut the door behind him and left me to do the persuading. Steve
and I looked at each other, realizing the burden Jerry left on me. We burst out laughing.
He liked my idea. He’d do the lyrics.
The project quickly turned into a nightmare. Lenny could only work in the middle of
the night, Jerry could only work in the morning. I’d meet with Jerry, go home, spend the
day doing my rewrites, go uptown to meet with Lenny and Steve, Steve and I would then
review the notes in some all-night bar. I would go home and type and be at Jerry’s at a.m.
I remember months of no sleep, a lot of bourbon and pizza slices. Jerry took me to his house
at Snedens Landing up the Hudson for a weekend of work. He showed me the room where
I’d be staying, locked the door behind me, and said I could come out when he approved
(L to R) Joseph Papp, Ron Leibman, and John Guare during rehearsal of Rich and Famous in 1976. Photo © Martha Swope.
of the pages I would type and slip under the door. I could have jumped out of the window
onto the lawn below if there was a fire, but it all seemed to be part of some great story.
We auditioned material for Zero Mostel, who approved. We had dates for a production. We kept getting further away from what I had brought to the project, but Jerry was
the boss. One day at an audition at the Shubert Theatre, Jerry excused himself before the
next actor came on to sing. Lenny and I waited for Jerry to return. I went looking. The
guy at the stage door told me Mr. Robbins had taken a car to Kennedy Airport to go to
England. Lenny burst into tears. I was exhilarated in some way to be free of the nightmare
this project had become. Warren and Betty Ann said, “Now will you get back to work on
Blue Leaves?”
I had written a play for my Yale friends Ron Leibman and Linda Lavin. Cop Out opened in
early ’on Broadway to devastatingly bad reviews. One paper said it wasn’t a review; it was
an obituary. Six weeks later in the Variety poll of the critics, the same critics voted me most
promising playwright of the season over a lot of other writers who had got good, even great
reviews. No comfort. I went to the Arctic Circle to start hitching and lick my wounds.
I had to come home and finish Blue Leaves. A producer who had seen my work at the
O’Neill recommended me to Milos Forman, who was starting his American film career.
Milos and I worked on the screenplay of Taking Off.
I finished Blue Leaves, which opened in February . Steve Sondheim sent a telegram
that read, “Have a wonderful opening. Your entire future depends on it,” which made me
quake with laughter and horror because it was true. The play got good reviews.
Joe Papp asked Mel Shapiro, the director of Blue Leaves, to direct Two Gentleman of
Verona in the park, with music by Galt McDermot of Hair. Mel brought me on as lyricist
and colibrettist. The musical designed to play in the park and on the streets turned into a
hit and transferred to Broadway.
On December , , the ecstatic reviews came out. Yes! This was the way life was going
to be from now on! A hit play off Broadway and a smash musical on Broadway. On the
morning of December , , the Blue Leaves theater burned down, the sets and costumes
vandalized. In the tenement next door to the theater, a man was found with his throat cut.
Police determined it was three separate, overlapping incidents. The uninsured play never
closed. We just burned up.
Joe Papp and I had a falling out. I would no longer work at the Public. I turned down
offers to do more musicals and instead went to Nantucket to start a theater and do a new
play inspired by my trip to the Arctic. While on Nantucket, I met Adele, the woman who’d
be my wife, in an empty house. The person we had each come to visit had left the island
and not locked his door.
Ten years had gone by.
I wrote Rich and Famous to understand where, who the hell I was. Three sacred monsters I had worked with in the past frame of time named Lenny, Jerry, and Joe became
Anatol Torah. I wanted to get my parents, my past, my dreams out of me and start all over
again. Dreams, the past—they don’t get shucked off that neatly.
It’s only now that I can recognize this wasn’t a chaotic time with one event tumbling
chaotically after another. My plays were the only constant in the past ten years. Random?
Forget it. The plays were a runaway locomotive that ran on invisible railroad tracks linking
all these events.
The only answer I learned and still stick to all these years later is all I could do was
keep writing.
When I was a kid, I prayed to God, “Please make me a playwright.” I forgot to pray for
any of the adjectives—like a happy playwright, or successful, or good. I just prayed to be a
playwright. That’s been my life since , when I wrote three plays at age and put them
on in Bobby Schlomm’s garage in East Atlantic Beach, New York, on Long Island.
I still live on the same street and look at that garage across the street and feel the same
excitement and need I felt then as I do now.
Thank you, Carey and a.c.t., for letting me come back and revisit this play.
the thrill of the play
An Interview with John Guare
by dan rubin
B
ing Ringling, the protagonist of Rich and Famous, is Broadway’s oldest promising
playwright; John Guare was once the youngest. In , Guare received his first
theatrical write up: “John Guare, Eleven-Year-Old Playwright.” The review was in
response to the premier of three one-act plays in the most modest of Long Island venues,
his neighbor’s garage. Guare’s parents bought him a typewriter for his th birthday, and
his destiny was clear.
Guare’s early education in the theater consisted of riding the noisy and crowded subways of New York, poring over the pages of Life magazine, and sneaking into the second
acts of Broadway shows. His formal education: a b.a. from Georgetown University, where
he entered the playwriting competition annually, and an m.f.a. in playwriting from the
Yale School of Drama. After years of education, Guare took a pilgrimage to Europe
and Africa to find his story, only to discover that his true inspiration had always been and
would always be New York City. He returned to New York in and immediately set
out to capture the frenetic musicality and surreal humanity of the city that never sleeps in
a body of work that has waged a clever campaign against kitchen-sink naturalism for the
past four decades.
With a robust dramaturgy of darkly humorous plays that juxtapose the everyday with
the extraordinary and the exaggerated, Guare is best probably best known for his plays The
House of Blue Leaves () and Six Degrees of Separation (). Blue Leaves won the New
York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play in and four Tony Awards
for its revival at Lincoln Center Theater; Six Degrees won an obie Award, the New
York Drama Critics Circle Award, and London’s Olivier Award for Best Play, and it was
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. He has received awards for a number his plays,
including Muzeeka (), Marco Polo Sings a Solo (), Landscape of the Body (), and
Bosoms and Neglect (), in addition to his libretto for Mel Shapiro’s musical adaptation
of Two Gentlemen of Verona () and his screenplay Atlantic City (). His series of
plays on th-century America (Gardenia [], Lydie Breeze [], and Women and Water
[]) has been produced across the country and on three continents. Signature Theatre
Company dedicated its – season to Guare’s work; he is an inductee in the Theatre
Hall of Fame; and he has been named one of New York City’s Living Landmarks. He
currently teaches playwriting at Yale, and is executive editor of the Lincoln Center Theater
Review, which he founded.
Coming off the success of Blue Leaves and Two Gentlemen of Verona, Guare wrote
Rich and Famous over the course of three days in . “Having what I dreamed of having only made me question where I was headed,” he writes in The War against the Kitchen
Sink, a collection of five plays. He wrote Rich and Famous with two actors in mind,
the husband-wife duo Ron Leibman and Linda Lavin, whom he met during his fellowship at Yale and had worked with on his play Cop-Out. Rich and Famous premiered
at the Academy Festival Theater outside Chicago and then went on to the Williamstown
Theatre Festival in ’ before receiving its first New York production at Joseph Papp’s Public
Theater. A highly praised production at the Trinity Square Repertory Company in
Providence followed, as did a New York revival in .
In preparation for a.c.t.’s production, Guare revisited Rich and Famous for the
first time in years, incorporating a passage from his first commercially produced play,
Muzeeka, and adding new music. In an interview with a.c.t. two weeks before rehearsals
began, he describes the experience of writing, and revisiting, a play he considers a personal
landmark.
(L to R) Ron Leibman, William Atherton, and Anita Gillette in the 1976 New York production of Rich and Famous. Photo © Martha
Swope.
how did you approach reworking the RICH AND FAMOUS script for the
a.c.t. production?
What had always troubled me about the play when I wrote it was I could never figure
out what Bing’s play was, the play that was opening that night. A couple of years ago I
was walking along the beach of Long Island, and it came to me out of the blue: since it
takes place on the night of the guy’s first commercially produced play, the play that should
be opening that night should be [the equivalent for me]. There is a part of Muzeeka that
is very important to me, the speech about the Etruscans, so I made that the core of this
play.
but MUZEEKA was very well received. what went into the decision to
make one of your successes bing’s flop?
When Rich and Famous was done people would say, “Well is this guy a good playwright or
not?” So I decided to make it [the Etruscan monologue from] Muzeeka, and I wasn’t being
autobiographically true, but it was a piece of work that I really loved and was in a play that
was sort of lost. I wrote it when I was stuck in the Etruscan museum in Rome. I didn’t
know what it meant, but it just seemed absolutely astonishing—this race of people that just
vanished. Where did they go? And they’re out there just waiting for us.
did you share bing’s anxiety when MUZEEKA first went up?
It was a nightmare. The night it opened, it was on a double bill with Sam Shepard’s Red
Cross. They were both our first commercially produced plays. Sam was not there that night
(he was in Europe or California or someplace), and I could not bear the idea of opening
night, which I had been waiting for for so long, being so sickening. I remember, I went to
Staten Island and took a trip on the Staten Island ferry just to kill time and came back on
the ferry figuring that the performance must be over. But when I got to the Provincetown
Playhouse, I saw all the audience outside on the street because the play hadn’t begun
yet—the lights for this little theater were so bright that they blew out the transformer and
they had to wait for the electrician to come and bring a new generator in.
so you accidentally went to the opening night of your first commercial play?
Yes, I accidentally went to the opening night.
the reviews of THE ETRUSCAN CONUNDRUM , bing’s play, are not favorable,
and you quote a 1969 review of your play COP-OUT that claimed to be
an obituary, not a review. do you read your reviews?
I don’t read any of them. After that night, I never read them again. Good or bad.
in your essay you write that, when you originally wrote RICH AND
FAMOUS , you took your experiences from the ten years leading up to
this play and in a sense exorcised them from yourself.
That’s what I needed to write at that time. It wasn’t a situation where I sat down and said,
“I am going to will this play into existence.” It’s a landmark in my life of where I was years ago.
what has it been like to revisit that period of your life?
It’ s like a dog living in an eternal present. It was wonderful to go back and see, “Oh, this
is where I was years ago,” and you just move back into that. It’s a very sweet feeling: it
made me think of Ron Leibman and Linda Lavin, whom I love, and Mel Shapiro, and the
two places where the play was done, in Williamstown and at a wonderful theater in Lake
Forest, outside Chicago. And it makes me think, “Oh well the play’s story is not over. It
found its way from the Public to a.c.t.”
do you feel that you have just now finished a play that you
started 30 years ago?
Yes. Paul Valéry, the French poet, says a writer never finishes a work, he merely abandons
it. That’s what an opening night is about: you say, “Okay, this is as much as I can do with
the play now.” It’s the same with Tom Stoppard going back and rewriting Rock ’n’ Roll [for
a.c.t.] after two successful productions.
do you feel that bing’s situation is common for playwrights
struggling to get their start in new york today, especially now
with the current economy?
It’s never been favorable for playwrights or for art. It’s never been a great time. With the
last administration, and with the [diminishing] amount of nea grants, it’s just harder. It
was always hard to get things on even before there were grants, and then there were grants
and it didn’t change. In America, in a free market society, people care about success, but
they don’t care about art, they don’t care about the process of art. You just have to remove
yourself from it and just keep on writing no matter what.
Joy Carlin in the 1972 A.C.T. production of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves
how do you balance writing with teaching and editing?
Well, you don’t write hours a day. You have a life that feeds your writing. When you’re
teaching, what you are trying to do is help the playwrights in your class find their own
voice. And I only generally teach technical problems that I am going through myself at
that time. You cannot teach writing from an Olympian point of view; we’re all in the same
. . . when you are faced with that blank page and you are trying to solve something, you’re
all dealing with the same technical problems. Exposition, the first minutes of a play:
What information does the audience get in the first minutes of a play? What does the
audience need to enter into the world of the play and continue on in the play? That’s why
I teach: to figure out my own plays.
you’ve been called a living landmark of new york city, you’ve lived
in new york much of your life, and you live on the same street you
grew up on.
At the beach, yes the same house I grew up in.
how does new york feed your work?
It’s my home. I went to Wharton, Texas, a little while ago to spend time with Horton
Foote, who’s written for years about this little town. It’s fed him for years. New York
is my Wharton, Texas. The energy of New York is just thrilling. It’s a privilege to live in
New York. It’s so much fun, and there’s so much to see, and it’s a very vital place.
when you first started out, you went to europe to find your story,
but you found your story back in new york.
I realized that my home was where my story was. I wasn’t going to find it out there; I had
to go into my own home. I had to accept where I was from and explore that.
how do you feel about the renewed interest in your work in san
francisco?
It’s great. The last time I had a play done at a.c.t. was many years ago [], when they
apparently did a perfect production of The House of Blue Leaves with Joy Carlin, a great
San Francisco actress. She directed Bosoms and Neglect, another play of mine, at Aurora
Theatre Company last year. And another theater [SF Playhouse] is doing Landscape of the
Body this season.
do you think it is every artist’s dream to become rich and famous,
or is the problem with bing that he is only focusing on wealth
and notoriety?
In a famous exchange of telegrams, Samuel Goldwyn, the movie producer, wrote George
Bernard Shaw saying that he wanted to make movies of his plays and he would ensure
that they were treated with the highest possible artistic standards and would oversee that
Shaw’s vision was protected. Shaw telegrammed him back and said, “Your problem, Mr.
Goldwyn, is that you only want to talk about art and I only want to talk about money.”
Who wouldn’t like to be recognized? Who says, “I hope, as an artist, I’m really never recognized”?
what has been your own relationship with hollywood and movies
and television?
My happiest moment, a number of years ago, was when I withdrew from the Writers’
Guild, because I never want to work in movies again. It’s too awful. You don’t own your
work. People always say, “What’s the difference between writing for theater and writing for
movies?” The main difference between writing for theater and writing for movies is that
in the movies some producer or some studio owns your work and the writer is just a hired
hand on his or her own work. In exchange for surrendering your copyright, you’re paid up
front. In the theater, a playwright owns his or her work and your work is leased from you by
the producer; nothing can be put on that stage without the playwright’s permission. That
difference of ownership and the relationship to the work is so profound. The writer’s life
is hard enough, but that lack of ownership over your own work is more humiliating than
is possible; it creates a life that is more humiliating than is livable.
how much involvement do you have during the first production of
a play?
A playwright can forgo their right of approval, but I love to sit in on set and costume
design meetings. Working with the director on casting is the most important part of the
play. That’s the thrill of building a play. A novelist finishes a work and you send it off to
the editor and it is just sent back and forth and you never have to meet anybody, it just
goes through the mail. The minute you finish your play and it’s accepted for production,
a whole new universe begins peopled by actors and designers and the theater. The process
of putting on a play is exhilarating and life giving. Putting on a play is a whole other step
along the way: it may all go wrong or it may all go right. The production of the play is part
of the completion of the writing of the play.
has that exhilaration always been there, ever since you wrote
your first play at age 11?
Absolutely.
has it ever waned?
No. How could it wane? Every play has its own rules.
do you learn something new with every play?
Yes, but it’s of no use to the next play. Every time you start a new play you are starting
from scratch. I think you have to keep painting yourself into corners with each play, and see
how you’re going to get out of it. You take up a subject that you’ve not dealt with before,
events that have happened before, and say, “How am I going to tell this story?” Every story
demands a new way, its own way to be told. You can’t use the last play’s tools to tell the
next play’s story.
hello from “lower death street”
The World of Off-Off Broadway
by megan cohen
T
he decade preceding the New York premiere of Rich and Famous saw the rise of
the off-off-Broadway theater movement in the landscape of downtown Manhattan.
The artistically adventurous off-off shows were fundamentally different in style and goal
from the more conventional uptown Broadway productions and more commercial than the
fare presented at mid-range off-Broadway theaters.
Coined in in the weekly Village Voice, the term “off-off Broadway” became shorthand
for the work of a collection of artists in New York’s Greenwich Village who gathered at a
series of small venues to produce an extraordinary amount of groundbreaking theater. Some
of these spaces hosted hundreds of new plays each year. Among the artists who first found
their creative footing on this fast-paced training ground were playwrights Sam Shepard,
Lanford Wilson, and John Guare and performers Bernadette Peters and Bette Midler.
When a New York Times article referred to the off-off-Broadway world as “the
pass-the-hat circuit,” the description was literal. The shows were almost always free to
attend, and the only potential source of income for cast and crew was a share of the take
from a basket or hat sent through the crowd for postperformance donations and tips.
Although the most popular shows found financial backing to transfer to larger spaces—
sometimes moving to off Broadway, where tickets cost up to $—and occasionally made
it all the way to Broadway, Europe, or television, the focus was not on being discovered by
a wider audience, but on embodying a by-us-for-us aesthetic and ethos that reflected and
expressed the nature of life in the Village at that moment,.
Ralph Cook, the founder of Theatre Genesis and a pioneer of the off-off movement,
described the character of the work as essentially unlike that found elsewhere, because “the
actors, directors, and writers are members of a geographical community and we are presenting plays for members of that community, not as a special gala event but as an integral
part of the life of the community.”
In Rich and Famous, Bing Ringling’s th play, The Etruscan Conundrum, is produced
in the ultimate off-off Broadway venue: “a toilet on Lower Death Street.” The Village
made room for performances in its cafés and restaurants, its churches and laundromats, its grungy back rooms and basements. According to Michael Smith, drama critic
for the Voice during off-off Broadway’s peak, the movement achieved “theater without
theaters” as performing artists colonized these unexpected spaces as stages for their
Caffe Cino. Photo by James D. Gossage.
premieres. Professional actors from uptown would sometimes come down to “slum” in
the casts, but the scene was distinctly dominated by Village residents who drank their
daily coffee in the same cafés, ate in the same restaurants, went to the same churches, and
washed their clothes in the same laundromats where they practiced their art.
Although capacity audiences at off-off Broadway shows numbered people or fewer,
cramped quarters ruled the day, and the front row was often within arm’s reach of the
cast. This fact was exploited, not just through emotional immediacy, but also occasionally
through actual physical contact. In Dionysus in at The Living Theatre, onlookers were
invited to strip to their skivvies and jump onstage to join the barely clothed cast in enacting
“The Rite of Universal Intercourse.” In shows at Judson Poets Theatre at Judson Memorial
Church, actors routinely worked alongside amateurs pulled from the congregation, further
demolishing whatever boundaries might exist between the performers and their spectators.
A typical show at Joe Cino’s storefront Caffe Cino was brief and rowdy, with patrons
eating and drinking throughout, and performances often started with the proprietor jumping in front of the gaudy gold curtain, pulling his trousers down, mooning the audience,
and shouting “On with the show!” “No play ran over minutes,” remembers playwright
Lanford Wilson of evenings at the overstuffed venue, “because that was as long as anyone
could hold out on those tiny chairs.” Those minutes might contain anything from a
kitsch musical comedy glittering with sequins to a focused, minimalist drama featuring
two actors in bed for the duration.
At La MaMa, Judson, and Genesis, the plays were just as varied and intense. Some
off-off pieces were traditional narratives with characters and plotlines, while others
vaulted into the realm of abstraction, dance, or even ritual. Violence and cruelty were just
as likely to be on the menu as laughter, and one Cino show’s climax, featuring an unseen
actor’s wrenching screams of pain as he was “tortured” offstage, routinely brought police
to the scene to investigate. Much of the work was influenced by the avant-garde theories
of Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski, but productions were also marked by streaks of
vaudeville and camp and even the occasional appearance of onstage acrobatics. The specific
artistic tactics ran a wide gamut, but the characteristic these diverse shows shared was an
eagerness to break aesthetic ground.
In the early ’s, the tenor of daily life in the Village shifted, in part due to the emergence of harder drugs on the nightclub circuit, which shared its walls and its patrons with
the theater scene, and in part due to demographic changes in the area. A New York
Times article suggested that the rapid rise in crime was due in part to an influx of “undesirables,” mainly single male drug addicts, whom the city had pushed downtown in an effort
to clean up Times Square. Actor Albert Poland remembered performing during this time:
“No money, no props, no sets, muggers on the streets. Once when I was playing a scene
with Neil Flanagan, we heard six shots ring out next door. We just shrugged and went on.”
Downtown rents climbed more quickly than the crime statistics: one Village storefront
that rented for $ per month in had skyrocketed to $ per month by .
By the time John Guare wrote Rich and Famous, the once-flourishing off-offBroadway movement had slowed. As rents rose and support in the larger New York
community grew for the movement’s breakout successes, including Guare, the energy
behind the self-contained, self-supporting, fly-by-night, pass-the-hat ethos flagged.
Off-off-Broadway theater became less of an expression of Village life and more of a
springboard to the outside world.
the worst of times in times square
T
he Times Square area during the early s was grungy, desperate, depressed, and
depressing. Legislation in the mid ’s that led to freer distribution of pornographic
materials had changed the area, and an energetic drug trade followed close on the heels of
the new wave of adult bookstores and strip clubs. In Downnd Street: Sex, Money, Culture,
and Politics at the Crossroads of the World, Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert
Organization, described Times Square circa thusly:
The place was chock-full of concentrated
pornography and ground zero for wall-towall hookers. Things had gotten so bad
they began lining up day and night along
8th Avenue, barely a half a block away
from our biggest and most famous theaters,
harassing our patrons, and they became
bolder the later it got into the night. We
finally had to advance our curtains to so people could get out earlier.
As family-owned businesses such as restaurants, corner stores, and pinball arcades dropped
out of sight, the area became completely dominated by the drug and sex trades. Even the
once-glowing billboards on the famous Allied
Chemical Tower at Times Square had gone
dark. James Traub:
Sketch of Aphro as a hooker by costume designer
Gregory Gale
By the mid s, nd Street was understood to be a dead place. Once it had been the heart of the very greatest city in
the world; now, like New York itself, it felt like a relic, a reminder of past glories. Yet, nd Street could not simply be abandoned, like the polluted terrain
of an old factory. At the level of symbolism, the block’s predatory environment
was disastrous for a city that already had a well-deserved reputation as one of
the seamiest and most dangerous places in the country.
blaze of glory
by lesley gibson
I
n Rich and Famous, Bing Ringling’s wealthy and successful producer, Veronica GulppVestige, gains a perverse sort of ecstasy from finally being associated with a flop. “My
hits linger year after year,” she says, before climbing into a garbage can. “Failures are these
beautiful youths who died before their time.”
To some fans of the theater, there is a particular delight in witnessing a major dramatic
disaster. A live-action catastrophe, if it is truly bad enough, can evoke as sublime an emotional experience as a perfectly executed masterpiece, and may provide audience members
with bragging rights for a lifetime. After all, the biggest Broadway hits run for months if
not years at a time, play to sold-out audiences, and launch massive world tours that are
seen by thousands. But for those flops that are so abysmal they achieve the elusive humiliation of closing on opening night, only a very select few individuals will have disastrous
anecdotes with which to regale their friends.
dead MOOSE
Two productions in Broadway’s recent past were such colossal failures that they live on as
legends of majestic catastrophe in theater lore, failures that fans continue to regard with
wicked fondness: the play Moose Murders and the musical adaptation of the
Stephen King novel Carrie.
It is generally accepted among theater aficionados that Arthur Bicknell’s Moose Murders
remains the epitome of bad on Broadway. The bizarre mystery farce chronicles the events
of a single night as an absurd cast of characters find themselves stuck in a hunting lodge
in the Adirondacks during a thunderstorm in the wake of a murder: the maniacal millionaire Hedda Holloway; her quadriplegic husband, Sidney; their son, Stinky, whose
singular goal is to sleep with his mother; their anorexic elder daughter, Lauraine; and their
young tap-dancing daughter, Gay. Audiences watched aghast as the ludicrous events of
the play unfolded, including the wheelchair-bound Sidney’s unexplained rise to his feet to
kick an intruder dressed in a moose costume in the groin. In the play’s final scene, Hedda
clapped in delight as Gay, whom she had served a poisoned martini, expired on the floor
in agony.
The terrible script was further tainted by a ruinous preview process (including one
performance to which a particularly rotund gentleman arrived late, reeking of the fresh
vomit that ran down his shirt front). The bad buzz building up to the show’s opening was
an ominous portent of the production’s fate. Moose Murders opened on February and
closed the following day.
The reviews for Moose Murders were not simply poor evaluations of a disappointing
production. They expressed a range of emotions from critics, who received the play with
befuddlement, humor, and depression. New York magazine’s John Simon declared the play
“abysmally imbecile,” adding, “[It was] as close as I ever hope to get to the bottomless pit.”
The New Yorker’s Brendan Gill described it as a play that “would insult the intelligence
of an audience consisting entirely of amoebas,” while Dennis Cunningham, critic at the
cbs affiliate in New York, declared: “If your name is Arthur Bicknell—or anything like
it—change it.”
The New York Times’s Frank Rich opened his review with the statement, “From now on,
there will always be two groups of theatergoers in this world: those who have seen Moose
Murders, and those who have not.” Eleven years later, when he stepped down from his post
as the Times’s chief theater critic, Rich still remembered the show as “the worst play I’ve
ever seen on a Broadway stage.” Yet members of the original cast boast their Moose Murder
credit in Playbill biographies, the number of people who claim to have seen the original
The shower scene from the legendary 1988 Broadway production of Carrie: young ladies taunt ignorant Carrie on the occasion
of her first period. Photo courtesy Peter Cunningham.
production has climbed to physically impossible proportions, and tribute productions of
Moose Murders continue to appear in venues from Oklahoma to the Philippines.
miserable musicals
There is nothing quite so exquisitely entertaining as a bad musical, but major Broadway
musical flops are a relatively rare treat in this day and age. Cultural and economic factors
have shrunk the number of new musical works launched each Broadway season to a fraction of what they once were. In the current climate, it is not uncommon for a musical to
run at one theater for years, while those same theaters once hosted two or three shows in a
single season. During the s and ’s, new works reached the Broadway stage at a much
more frequent rate; there were therefore many more opportunities for instant flops. Even
now, however, every few years or so a show makes it to Broadway that is so bad that the
producers are left with no other option but to close it immediately after opening. Recent
stinkers have included Andrew Lloyd Weber’s The Woman in White ()—proving that
even traditional hit makers can stumble—Elton John’s Lestat (), High Fidelity (),
and the million Mambo Kings (), which bombed so badly in its San Francisco tryout that it never even made it to Broadway.
None of these, however, surpasses the cult fame of Carrie, which crashed and burned—
or, in Rich’s words, “expire[d] with fireworks like the Hindenburg”—on the Broadway
stage in . Plagued by “faceless, bubble gum music [and] grotesque sub-Atlantic City
costumes,” an over-the-hill cast badly mimicking teenagers, and faux pig’s blood of a
syrupy texture and appearance, Carrie has become the Broadway flop against which all
flops are measured. In Not Since Carrie, his collection of musical flop stories, Ken
Mandelbaum describes the mood after the show’s first preview:
As the audience files out, some appear thrilled, others appalled; the word most
frequently bandied about is “unbelievable.” For show freaks, this has been a
night unlike any other, the kind for which they have waited a lifetime. . . . These
fans are aware that what they have just witnessed has set a new standard, one to
which all future musical flops will be compared and found wanting.
Carrie did not close on opening night, but lasted five full performances. Rich’s review
noted, “Only the absence of antlers separates the pig murders of Carrie from the Moose
Murders of Broadway lore.” The show became an instant failure and an enduring legend.
the key to failure
Under what circumstances does a show close so quickly?
Most theatrical failures follow a similar pattern. By the time a show makes it to the
Broadway stage, it has undergone a series of preview performances and, often, an out-oftown warm-up run. Typically presented at a high-profile regional theater, a warm-up run
gives the producers and the director a chance to gauge the critical and popular reception
and make any necessary adjustments before thrusting the show into the Broadway spotlight. The official opening in New York will be preceded by – previews—complete
performances of the show, in costume, before live audiences, that give the director a last
chance to tweak the show before it is considered officially ready and subjected to the critical review of the press.
Some shows begin to garner negative word of mouth from individuals who see the
show while it’s still in previews. The advent of the internet has accelerated the spread of
bad buzz, as computer-age producers live in fear of scathing critique from the “chatterati”
who frequent online theater forums like talkinbroadway.com’s All That Chat. Sometimes
the buzz results in poor ticket sales; if the producers recognize they have a subpar product
and anticipate harsh opening night reviews, they may secretly begin to consider closing the
show immediately after it opens. The assumption is that, with low ticket sales, each additional performance costs more to produce than they earn, so shutting down the production
is a safer bet financially than continuing operations.
Not all failures crash and burn in a blaze of glory. The more banal flops are quickly
forgotten, their memory only kept alive as tales for theater geeks and warnings to producers of the future. This type of flop does not necessarily occur because of large-scale artistic
or financial catastrophe, but because the show itself is ill conceived, underdeveloped, or
simply boring. A adaptation of Allan Gurganus’s novel The Oldest Living Confederate
Widow Tells All, for example, a one-woman show that closed on opening night, failed to
create a riveting theatrical experience out of the experiences of a frail, bed-ridden elderly
woman on death’s doorstep. And the Glory Days, a musical by two -year-olds about
a group of mild-mannered middle-class high school friends who reunite after a year away
at college, was critically dismissed as a nice try by earnest young men; the show sold at a
mere percent of capacity and quietly closed the morning after it opened.
On his way to the opening night performance of his th play, a work apparently
destined to find its place in the annals of legendary New York theater flops, Bing puts on
a pair of cuff links, a gift from his girlfriend. The cuff links bear the initials r and f for
“rich” and “famous.” “I don’t care which one comes first,” he tells Leanara. We will never
know if Bing achieves the wealth he dreams of, but we can only hope that the failure of
The Etruscan Conundrum will grant him the notoriety he yearns for.
a short history of the etruscan people
by robert guisepi
L
ong before the days of Rome’s greatness, Italy was the home of a people far advanced
in civilization—the Etruscans, or Tyrrhenians. These people rose to prosperity and
power, then almost vanished from recorded history, leaving unsolved many questions about
their origin and culture.
Scholars think that the Etruscans were a seafaring people from Asia Minor. As early
as b.c.e. they were living in Italy in an area that was roughly equivalent to modern
Tuscany, from the Tiber River north almost to the Arno River. Later their rule embraced
a large part of western Italy, including Rome.
From the end of the th
century b.c.e. and in the th
century b.c.e. they had a decisive impact on the history of
Rome, where the Etruscan
dynasty of the Tarquins is said
to have ruled from to
b.c.e. Rome before the
Etruscan advent had been a
small conglomeration of villages. It was under the new
masters that, according to tradition, the first public works,
such as the walls of the
Capitoline hill and the Cloaca Etruscan Amphora with Two Dancing Nudes. Museo Archeologico Regionale di
Palermo. Photo by Giovanni Dall’Orto.
Maxima (a sewer), were constructed. Considerable evidence of the Etruscan period in Rome’s history has come to light in the region of the
Capitol. That there were rich tombs in Rome itself cannot be doubted.
Etruscans established a thriving commercial and agricultural civilization. Characteristic
of their artistic achievements are the wall frescoes and realistic terra-cotta portraits found
in their tombs. Their religion employed elaborately organized cults and rituals, including
the extensive practice of divination. Because little Etruscan literature remains and the language of inscriptions on their monuments has been only partially deciphered, scholars have
Youth Playing the Flute and Riding a Dolphin, Etruria, 360–340 B.C.E. Museo Arqueológico Nacional de España. Photo
© Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons.
gained most of their knowledge of the Etruscans from studying the remains of their city
walls, houses, monuments, and tombs. Weapons and other implements, exquisite jewelry,
coins, statues of stone, bronze, and terra-cotta, and black pottery (called bucchero) have
been found. Grecian and oriental influences are seen in this art.
After losing control of Rome about b.c.e., the Etruscans strengthened their naval
power through an alliance with Carthage against Greece. In b.c.e. their fleet was
destroyed by the Greeks of Syracuse. From that time their power rapidly declined. The
Gauls overran the country from the north, and the Etruscans’ strong southern fortress of
Veii fell to Rome after a ten-year siege (b.c.e.). The Etruscans were absorbed by the
Romans, who adopted many of their advanced arts, their customs, and their institutions.
Excerpted from “Etruscans: A History of the Etruscan People, Including Their Cities, Art, Society, Rulers, and Contributions to
Civilization” (2002), International World History Project: World History from The Pre-Sumerian Period to the Present, http://
history-world.org/etruscans.htm.
a RICH AND FAMOUS glossary
by megan cohen
“success / is the cress / that you fress / at lutèce”
Soon after its opening in , the French restaurant Lutèce became a renowned dining
spot for the international jet set in New York. For Bing to “fress” (gobble ravenously) the
cress there would have been a major sign of his arrival as a person of importance.
“jesus, buddha, mary baker eddy, which ever one of you got cast in
the role of god up in heaven, please help me”
Mary Baker Eddy was the founder of the Christian Science religious movement. Bing is
covering all his bases.
“you’re the producer’s producer! god, to take all those musicals—
SOUTH PACIFIC , CAROUSEL , GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES , WISH YOU WERE HERE —to
revive all those musicals and take the music out.”
A rarely revived musical comedy by Arthur Kober, Joshua Logan, and Harold Rome, Wish
You Were Here takes place at Camp Karefree in Vacationland, a kind of summer camp for
adults. The Broadway production ran – and featured a swimming pool built
into the stage.
“degrading? no! it ’s like being a kelly girl, only in the gutter.”
Kelly Girls were temps who worked for Russell Kelly Office Services, the first temporary
employment agency in the United States. They held short stints as clerks, secretaries, and
typists and became an iconic image of youthful postwar protofeminism.
“i don’t think it’s too witty to be throwing up in front of the
algonquin. over at the dixie, maybe.”
The historic -room Algonquin Hotel, located at West th Street in Manhattan,
opened in . It became famous as the base of the Algonquin Round Table, an informal
group of American literary men and women who met daily for lunch on weekdays at a
large round table in the hotel from to . The group became celebrated for the lively,
witty conversation and urbane sophistication of its members, who included many of the
best-known playwrights, poets, journalists, publicists, actors, and artists in New York City,
such as Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Robert Benchley, Robert
Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, Franklin P. Adams, Marc Connelly, Harold Ross, Harpo
Marx, and Russell Crouse.
In contrast, the nearby Dixie Hotel, located on West rd Street between th and th
Avenues, was a notorious Times Square fleabag. Twenty-four stories high, it included
a -seat performance space, the Bert Wheeler Theater, which hosted entertainments
like the Follies Burlesque. A New York Times article remarked of the institution, by
then renamed the Hotel Carter, “People have been saying for years that the old Times
Square—the seedy, lowbrow ancestor of what is now a largely sanitized, Disneyfied tourist
haven—is dead. But those people have never spent a night at the Hotel Carter.”
“when they write the history of stink, this shall be the plimsoll
line.”
The Plimsoll line is a shipping term referring to the internationally standardized reference
line that marks the maximum load for cargo ships.
“i went to 21 tonight and i walked into that loathsome establishment, but where else can you go, and there i saw my spiritual
double.”
The Club, a longtime Manhattan meeting place (located on West nd Street) for
visitors from Hollywood and other celebrities, is a former speakeasy that has claimed
among its diners such illustrious personages as Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali, and
every president since Franklin Roosevelt (except George W. Bush). The club’s legendary
Prohibition-era cellar has stored the private wine collections of such luminaries as Richard
Nixon, Elizabeth Taylor, Ernest Hemingway, Ivan Boesky, Frank Sinatra, Al Jolson, Gloria
Vanderbilt, Sophia Loren, Mae West, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Aristotle Onassis, Gene Kelly,
Gloria Swanson, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Marilyn Monroe.
hare krishnas and THE BHAGAVAD GITA
The Hare Krishna movement is a semimonastic Vaishnava Hindu outgrowth of the
popular th-century Bengali bhakti (devotional) yoga tradition. Also known as Krishna
Consciousness, it was among the first groups to be targeted by anticult organizations in the
early s. Converts shaved their heads, adopted Indian clothing, and took to the streets
and airports to chant, dance, and sell their teacher’s books to passers-by. The Bhagavad
Gita is a Hindu devotional work in poetic form.
“my mind is racing like the allied chemical tower. where the news
goes round and round the building.”
The Allied Chemical Tower, also known as “ Times Square,” is wrapped by a -foot
electric sign, also called a “zipper,” which flashes the day’s Dow Jones headlines.
the ringling family’s name game
Bing’s parents have long pressured him to seek fame by playing a name-association game
in which they connect everyday words or inventions to celebrities and inventors:
write: Orville and Wilbur Wright, Americans credited with inventing, building, and flying the first successful airplane in .
day: Dennis Day, Irish tenor popular in the H–s.
night: Fuzzy McKnight, drag race driver.
phone: Alexander Graham Bell.
chanel: Coco Chanel, French fashion designer; creator of the perfume Chanel
No. .
good: Benny Goodman, American clarinetist known as “The King of
Swing.”
ritz: Monsieur César Ritz, founder of the Ritz and Carlton hotels in Paris
and London.
hilton: Conrad Hilton, founder of the American Hilton hotel chain.
conrad: Conrad Nagel, American matinee film idol of the s and beyond.
gregorian chant: Sixth-century Pope Gregory the Great is popularly credited with inventing the central liturgical chant of Western Christianity.
pope gregory: Gregory Peck, Academy Award–winning American actor who
starred in To Kill a Mockingbird
<G:<DGNE:8@“I love you / A bushel and a peck,” from Frank Loesser’s Guys
and Dolls.
webster’s dictionary: Noah Webster, creator in of the first unabridged
dictionary of American English.
love: Bessie Love, American film star popular in the s and beyond.
king: Dennis King, British-born Broadway actor; Billy Jean King, American
tennis player.
“that’s my girl”: Ziegfeld girl, showgirl who performed in Ziegfeld Follies,
extravagant productions that appeared on Broadway each year –
blue: Ben Blue, American actor/comedian popular in the s–s.
life: Miller’s High Life, Miller Brewing’s oldest beer, first put on the market
in .
miller’s high life: Ann Miller, American dancer, singer, and actress.
“john brown’s body”: Popular Union marching song during the American
Civil War that tells the tragic story of John Brown, an American abolitionist
who led an unsuccessful, but galvanizing raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in
credited with helping to start the war.
lionel train. Popular toy train produced by Lionel Corporation –
pullman car: George Pullman, industrialist who invented the Pullman sleeping car for use on railroads.
richter: Charles Richter, American physicist who in devised the Richter
scale for measuring the intensity of earthquakes.
pasteurized milk: Louis Pasteur, French scientist who in the s developed
the process of pasteurization, which destroys germs through heat.
graham crackers: Billy Graham, American evangelist and author.
orange julius: Fruit drink created by blending orange juice, crushed ice,
powdered whole milk, and egg whites, available since the late s, as well as
a food service franchise; named for Julius Caesar, Roman military and political
leader who played a critical role in the transformation of the Roman republic
into the Roman empire.
napoleon brandy: Napoleon Bonaparte, French military and political leader
who was a general during the French Revolution, the ruler of France as
first consul of the French Republic and emperor of the first French empire;
authentic Napoleon brandy was placed in wooden casks during his time (late
th–early th centuries), but now the appellation may refer to any distilled
fruit wine aged at least four years.
brandy alexander: Sweet brandy-based cocktail popular during the early
th century.
“alexander’s ragtime band”: Song by Irving Berlin, his first major hit.
names in lights: Claude Neon, form of lighting invented by French scientist
Georges Claude, based on filling glass vacuum tubes with neon gas.
tiffany lamp: Louis Tiffany, American Art Nouveau artist and designer
famous for his work in stained glass.
horace harding blvd.: Outer service road of the section of the Long Island
Expressway that runs through Queens; Horace Harding, prominent late-
th-century banker and director of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford
Railroad and the New York Municipal Railways System.
mason jars: Glass canning jars named after their inventor, John L. Mason;
Jackie Mason, American stand-up comedian popular in the s.
christopher medal: Saint Christopher, patron saint of travelers.
baby: Baby Snooks, vaudeville character portrayed by comedian Fanny Brice.
second chance: John Chancellor, American television journalist.
mesmerized: Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer, th-century German physician and
astrologist, whose ideas led to the development of hypnosis in 8DAJB7JHD=>DRuss Columbo, s–s crooner, famous for his hit single
“Prisoner of Love.”
burbank, california: Luther Burbank, American botanist who developed
more than strains of plants.
luther burbank: Martin Luther, German church reformer who became the
father of Protestantism in the s.
martin luther: Dean Martin, American singer and film actor who was part
of The Rat Pack; Mary Martin, Tony Award–winning American actress who
originated the role of Nellie in South Pacific.
norman mailer, marilyn, james dean, and postmortem celebrity
status
In his book Marilyn: A Biography, Norman Mailer lists a dozen other books about
Marilyn Monroe that also capitalize on the legend of the popular film star, who died in
under notorious and mysterious circumstances at the age of . The Marilyn industry
remains vigorously active, and the Forbes “Top-Earning Dead Celebrities” list estimated her estate’s current annual income at million, due in large part to the licensing
of her iconic, forever-young image for ad campaigns. The estate of her male counterpart,
James Dean, pulled in about million last year from a similar array of royalties and photo
licensing fees for advertising and merchandise.
questions to consider
. Why do you think Rich and Famous was written for a small cast of actors playing multiple
roles? How do you think the production would be different if each of the characters were
played by a different actor?
. John Guare incorporates music into Rich and Famous, yet it is not a musical. What is the
difference between a musical and a play with music, and what is the purpose of music in
each of these forms? What is the purpose of music in Rich and Famous?
. How does the episodic structure of the play’s scenes contribute to the phantasmagoric
effect of the completed production? What do you think each vignette represents in the life
of a playwright?
. Director John Rando suggests that Rich and Famous could only have been written in the
s. Do you agree? What elements of this play are distinctly influenced by the culture of
that decade? What elements transcend the period?
. How is Rich and Famous a critique of America’s culture of celebrity?
. What do the Etruscans represent to John Guare? What do they represent to Bing
Ringling?
. How does the play stretch the boundaries of realism? In what ways is reality warped and
in what ways does it completely disintegrate in Rich and Famous?
. What role does Allison play in Bing’s night, and what does she represent in Bing’s life?
How does her unhappy marriage bring Bing’s failure into new perspective?
. We meet Bing’s parents in the second to last scene of the play. What influence did they
have over their son, and how does your opinion of him change once you learn about his
roots?
. In the final moment of the play, The Actor and The Actress ask Bing, “What are you
going to do now?” He proceeds to remove one of his r and f cufflinks, but cannot loosen
the second. What is the significance of this final gesture? Which cufflink do you think he
was unable to remove? What do you think Bing will do next?
for further reading . . .
Bottoms, Stephen J. Playing Underground: A Critical History of the s Off-Off-Broadway
Movement. Ann Arbor, mi: The University of Michigan Press, .
Braudel, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York: Oxford University
Press, .
Bryer, Jackson R., ed. The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American
Dramatists. New Brunswick, nj: Rutgers University Press, .
Curry, Jane Kathleen. John Guare: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, ct:
Greenwood Press, .
Finkle, David. “Guare Necessities.” InTheater. December , : –.
Forbes, Malcolm. They Went That-a-Way: How the Famous, the Infamous, and the Great
Died. New York: Simon & Schuster, .
Giles, David. Illusions of Immortality: A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity. New York:
Palgrave, .
Guare, John. John Guare, Vol. : The War against the Kitchen Sink. Lyme, nh: Smith and
Kraus, .
———. Chaucer in Rome. New York; Dramatists Play Service Inc., .
———. Muzeeka. New York; Dramatists Play Service Inc., .
———. Six Degrees of Separation. New York; Dramatists Play Service Inc., .
———.The House of Blue Leaves. New York: Samuel French, Inc., .
Mandelbaum, Ken. Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, .
Martin, Nicholas. “Chaos and Other Muses.” American Theatre, April : –, .
Miller, Terry. Greenwich Village and How It Got That Way. New York: Crown Publishers, .
Plunka, Gene A. The Black Comedy of John Guare. University of Delaware Press, .
Smith, Michael. “The Good Scene: Off-Off Broadway.” Tulane Drama Review (Summer ): –.
Suskin, Steven. Second Act Trouble: Behind the Scenes at Broadway’s Big Musical Bombs. New
York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, .
Scenic plans for Rich and Famous by set designer Scott Bradley