Paris Before The Crash
By Paul Ledoux and John Roby
Two Acts.
Approximate running time 2 hours, 10 minutes.
Cast of 10: 5m. 5f. Chorus: 6f. Band: 8
Overview:
Paris Before
The Crash
centers on an impossible love triangle and an absurdist battle between literary
shooting stars.
Set in the Paris
expatriate community of the late Twenties, the play is the story of young men
and women burning their candles at both ends and dancing in the flames.
It’s about risking your life for an ideal you can’t quite name,
laughing in the face of disaster, exploring the forbidden and expecting fame.
Anyone who’s dreamed of changing the world and hit a brick wall will
recognize its heroes.
This is one of
the most famous eras in our literary imagination, a time and place that has been
visited and revisited by literati and romantic youth since Gertrude Stein’s
mechanic, complaining about the wastrel habits of his assistant, coined the
term, “lost generation.” But Paris Before The Crash offers a fresh
perspective by focusing on lesser known members of that community.
The play is a
work of fiction inspired by first person chronicles of the period, memoirs like
Hemingway’s classic hatchet job A Moveable Feast, Glassco’s Memoirs
of Montparnasse, Callaghan’s That Summer In Paris, McAlmon and
Boyle’s Being Geniuses Together, nightclub owner Bricktop’s
autobiography, the letters of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and many other primary
source materials. Likewise, it is
informed by works of auto-biographical fiction written during the period.
The end result is a close-to-the-facts comedy of bad manners.
The Story:
Primary action
revolves around a love triangle involving: Kay Boyle, a struggling young
novelist and single mother trying to fulfill her idealistic literary ambitions;
Robert McAlmon, an iconoclastic gay writer famous for publishing Hemingway and
Gertrude Stein; and John “Buffy” Glassco, a boyish pornographer and male
prostitute whose literary ambitions have been overwhelmed by his weakness for
the bohemian lifestyle. Their
story, driven by the unfulfilled relationship between McAlmon and Kay, in some
ways echoes thematic elements found in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
Secondary
action involves Morley Callaghan, an ambitious and naive young novelist who,
caught in the middle of the Hemingway/Fitzgerald relationship, learns his
literary heroes have feet of clay.
McAlmon’s disenchantment with Paris grows as Kay become
involved with a Spartan cult run by Isadora Duncan’s brother Raymond, Buffy gets tangled up with The Princess of Sarawack, a
scatterbrained British heiress and Zelda,
ignored by her Hemmingway obsessed husband, goes slowly mad.
McAlmon must overcome his cynicism and help his friends before he can put
his life in Paris behind him..