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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 27, 2017

My new play

January 27, 2017 by Terry Teachout

I rejoice to announce that my second play, Billy and Me, will be premiered in December by Palm Beach Dramaworks, where I made my stage directing debut last year. It’s a three-hander about the relationship between Tennessee Williams and William Inge.

Here are some relevant excerpts from PBD’s press release about Billy and Me, which was posted on the company’s website this morning.

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Billy and Me, a new play by Terry Teachout, whose Satchmo at the Waldorf has been produced to great acclaim off Broadway and throughout the country, will receive its world premiere next season at Palm Beach Dramaworks. “A work of fiction freely based on fact,” the play speculates on the tempestuous friendship between playwrights Tennessee Williams and William Inge. PBD Producing Artistic Director William Hayes, who suggested the idea to Teachout, will direct the premiere, which runs from December 8, 2017 through January 7, 2018.

“Having made my directing debut at PBD last season, I know very well that it’s a great place to work, a gorgeous theatre full of first-class people,” said Teachout, who directed Satchmo at the Waldorf here. “I also know that Bill is a superb director and a perfect colleague—the kind of guy who works with you to make a show as good as it can possibly be. For all these reasons, I’m hugely excited to be premiering my second play at PBD. It couldn’t be in better hands.”…

Hayes came up with the notion of a piece about the two playwrights while directing Inge’s Picnic in 2015. When Teachout was in town for production meetings on Satchmo, the two men went to lunch and Hayes asked whether the idea had potential. Teachout was intrigued. Flying back to New York the next day, he wrote the scenario “in a frenzy” on the plane.

“I phoned Bill from the plane as soon as I landed and said, ‘I think I know what the play is!’” Teachout recalls. “Ever since I first saw Freud’s Last Session at PBD, I’d wanted to try writing a history play of my own that takes place in a kind of blank historical space, an undocumented moment during which you know almost nothing for sure about what actually happened to the real-life characters. We know that Inge and Williams were friends, but neither one of them ever spoke on record about their relationship in any detail. That gave me the elbow room I needed to imagine for myself what might possibly have taken place between them.”

Billy and Me is a memory play narrated by WIlliams. Act I is set at a bar in Chicago on December 31, 1944, immediately after a pre-Broadway tryout of Williams’ The Glass Menagerie—the play that inspired Inge to become a playwright. Act II takes place almost 15 years later in Inge’s Manhattan apartment, a few hours after the Broadway premiere of his first flop, A Loss of Roses.

“It’s a play about love, jealousy, and—not to put it too pompously—destiny,” said Teachout. “An artist is a person who can’t do anything else with his life. Art is his fate: it’s that or nothing. But he can’t become an artist until he accepts that fate and acknowledges his true nature. That’s a big part of what this play is about: the struggle of two great American playwrights to come to terms with who they really were.”…

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Read the whole thing here.

Replay: Agnes Moorehead reads Proust on The Hollywood Palace

January 27, 2017 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAIn an excerpt from Come Closer, I’ll Give You an Earful, her one-woman stage show, Agnes Moorehead speaks a monologue from Marcel Proust’s Within a Budding Grove. This performance was part of an episode of The Hollywood Palace, originally telecast by ABC on December 17, 1966. Moorehead is introduced by Eddie Fisher:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

Almanac: Jacques Maritain on love at first sight

January 27, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Love at first sight does not deal with an object, but with a person. For those whom it strikes it is like a sudden illumination into a deep-rooted secret. They have been initiated.”

Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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