No Business Like Show Business: When Playwrights Kill

Beth Leavel and Marissa Jaret Winokur in When Playwrights Kill. (Photo: Jim Sabitus.)

When Playwrights Kill is a comedy à clef whose code can be deciphered by anyone who keeps up with theatrical gossip. In 2019 Faye Dunaway was fired from the Boston tryout of Matthew Lombardo’s one-woman show about Katharine Hepburn, Tea at Five, for physically and verbally abusive behavior backstage, and the production was terminated. Lombardo had written Tea at Five in 2002 for Kate Mulgrew, who played it off Broadway and elsewhere, but it was the draw of Dunaway’s return to the New York stage after nearly four decades that secured the play’s first Broadway contract, which was cancelled following the Dunaway debacle. (A sympathetic 2024 HBO documentary, Faye, chalks her hijinks up to bipolar disorder.) 

Now Lombardo has written an entertainingly unhinged comedy prompted by his nightmarish experiences with Dunaway, and, appropriately enough, it has been playing a one-week run at the Huntington Theatre in Boston, where the incidents that inspired When Playwrights Kill took place. It’s a small-scale show but audiences who follow theatre in the northeast should recognize all of the performers. Matt Doyle, the Tony Award-winning co-star of the last Company revival, is the Playwright, whose vehement protests against the hiring of a notorious aging diva are drowned out by the insistence of the pragmatic – read cheap – Producer (Adam Heller, a talented and hard-working character actor who was most memorable as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof at the Goodspeed Opera House). The philosophical director is played by Kevin Chamberlin (Uncle Fester in The Addams Family on Broadway). Marissa Jaret Winokur, the original Tracy Turnblad in the musical Hairspray, is the patient, grounded Stage Manager. The free-swinging Actress, who can’t commit a single one of her lines to memory and is permanently zonked on a startling variety of pills, is played by Beth Leavel, veteran of the Broadway runs of The Drowsy Chaperone, Bandstand and The Prom. When the only solution for her onstage confusion seems to be to fit her with an earpiece, the non-binary actor Tomás Matos shows up as the offstage Prompter, who doubles as a sort of unofficial caretaker.

This is an ensemble of pros that comports itself like a vaudeville company. Doyle, who makes his initial appearance in a straitjacket, narrating the story, is the energetic pivot of the group. The Playwright is, naturally, the most reasonable character on stage, and also the one who’s prone to hysterics, since everyone else who has to deal with the wigged-out Actress soldiers on, as if rehearsing a drug-addled loony bird who can’t remember to pick up the prop phone before speaking into the receiver were par for the show-biz course. Heller, Chamberlin and Matos each has a distinctive way of delivering a one-liner: Heller hits it square on as if he were wielding a croquet mallet, Chamberlin sweetens it with an ethereal calm, while Matos, a queer Afro-Latine performer with a spicy street vibe, has a bottomless supply of ironic ripostes. Winokur gets her laughs through skillful underplaying. But in what should be the juiciest role, Leavel is the only member of the sextet who wears out her welcome. She’s very funny for most of the first act, but her showmanship lacks variety – she’s like a musical-comedy star who belts every number.

Noah Himmelstein, who staged the show, sustains the pace (it comes in at a trim two hours, including intermission), but the script runs out of good ideas in the second act. The Playwright decides that the only way to save his sanity as well as his creation is to murder the Actress, and his harebrained schemes for eliminating her are silly and not very imaginative. Still, When Playwrights Kill is mostly a lark. It’s a treat to see these clowns work out in what, in Broadway’s golden age, was prime territory for prepping a fledgling property for New York.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.