Dorothy Parker hated the theater, especially the “wretched downtown plays. The actors represent characters like ‘truth’ or ‘poverty’ while the audience is content to represent ‘sleeping’ or ‘leaving.’”
Or so says Jackie Hoffman, one of the four funny ladies in “Finding Dorothy Parker,” eighty minutes that are largely verbatim excerpts from the varied and abundant output by the witty writer known best for her quips (“Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses” and “What fresh hell is this?” — which is how, we’re told, she answered her phone.) The show is “fashioned” and directed by playwright Douglas Carter Beane in an encore presentation at the Laurie Beechman Theater through January 22.
Did Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) really hate theater? She wrote plays and theater reviews, although her caustic wit did get her fired from Vanity Fair (Her best-known review: “Katherine Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.”)
Dorothy Parker also hated poets, Anika Larson says in the show, right before Ann Harada recites the first of a string of Parker’s poems. She hated music, Julie Halston says, right before Larson sings one of the songs for which Parker wrote the lyrics.
“I hate speakeasies,” Ann Harada says, right before a monologue by a character who drinks herself stupid in one.
Parker was an alcoholic who attempted suicide several times (as we’re told in one of the several biographical asides woven into the show) so maybe she was not just joking about all these antipathies. But it did not stop her from a prolific career. “The portable Dorothy Parker is 613 pages,” Hoffman says. “Since when is that portable.”
In culling through all this writing, Beane seems to have been torn between creating a light revue full of her one-liners, befitting a cabaret with a drink minimum, and dipping deeper into her work to show her range. This would explain some long monologues taken from her short stories and novellas. It doesn’t explain why they were all bunched together near the beginning, nor why they go on for quite as long as they do. But each has its moments.
In the first and longest, Julie Halston recites the inner monologue of a week in the life of a rich and shallow socialite (and, between the lines, a lonely one): “Started to read the papers but nothing in them except Moana Wheatly is in Reno charging intolerable cruelty. Called up Jim Wheatly to see if he had anything to do tonight, but he was all tied up”
Anika Larsen portrays the aforementioned woman at a speakeasy in conversation with an unseen and unheard Fred as she gets increasingly drunk and ever-more insulting about Edith, who is apparently Fred’s wife: ‘Do you really know a lot of people who say she’s good-looking? You must have a wide acquaintance among the astigmatic, haven’t you, Freddie, dear?”
Ann Harada portrays a woman who is pretending to enjoy dancing with a man she seems to detest: “I’d love to waltz with you. I’d love to have my tonsils out, I’d love to be in a midnight fire at sea” – the first sentence apparently to her dance partner, the latter two to herself.
Some of Dorothy Parker’s writing feels dated, especially a too-obvious satire of a woman who acknowledges her husband is racist but doesn’t realize she is as well. But the story leads into a fascinating fact: Dorothy Parker left her estate to a man she had never met — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
