Word: hemingways
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Early in 1961, Hunter saw a production in Los Angeles of a play written by a man named A.E. Hotchner, a television writer and close personal friend of Ernest Hemingway's Hotchner's play attempted to string together several Hemingway short stories to dramatize the life of the Nobel prize winning author. Despite the help of Rod Steiger in the lead role, the play did not succeed and Hunter came away from the performance feeling the fault was in the "bio play" format of the work. Hunter explains. "Such plays follow the chronology line of a person's life...
...form of The Hemingway Play allows four Hemingways to appear onstage at once. Four separate personalities, each from a different phase of Hemingway's life, meet one another in a Madrid cafe. The complexity of the man is revealed through characters who share common memories but cannot sort out the truth from the self-perpetuated myth. There's a showdown: the legendary man against himself, depicted so clearly by Hunter that the viewer is made aware of elements of the hell Hemingway must have been going through just prior to the taking of his own life...
...Hemingway commit suicide...
...never taken a course in playwriting. The first full-length play he ever wrote was about two people living in a museum. It was produced at UCLA and enjoyed moderate success. In 1968, when he completed, after several years, the manuscript of the second play he ever wrote, The Hemingway Play, he locked it away in a private drawer. Writing is a slow, careful process for Hunter. Even if he had actively sought one, a production would have been difficult to arrange. He was, after all, a young free-lance writer without theater connections, about to leave the country...
...wrote the play for a variety of reasons. Hemingway has played an important role in shaping the consciousness of our times...As a young writer I was intrigued by his style and found myself unconsciously trying to copy it...Eventually I became fascinated with the man himself, his internal contradictions as a man and artist...His failure to overcome the personal problems that led to his death...I was also interested in the possibility that--at least for theatrical purposes--past, present, and future could all occur simultaneously. This possibility merged with my musings about Hemingway and the form...