Word: woollcott
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT, the broadest wit of the twentieth century, returns to abuse and tickle the audience of Howard Teichmann's elegant one man show, Smart Aleck. Peter Boyden brings a lighthearted grace to the stage as the New York Times critic and founder of the Algonquin Round table. He evokes the theater and manners of the twenties and thirties with anecdotes and witticisms and carries off Woollcott's bitchy sexlessness with impeccable style. Introducing himself as "Alexander Woollcott, an American Original," Boyden launches into an amusing biography spiced with puns and literary anecdotes...
...Woollcott was born in Redbank, New Jersey in 1887 to a tenacious mother and a slovenly father, and at his mother's insistence, attended Hamilton College. There his flamboyance and decidedly eccentric manner made him the butt of many jokes, until he founded a dramatic society, where his behavior seemed excusable. A "hormonal imbalance" prevented sexual activity, and he readily channeled his energy to food, literary criticism, and the theater. When he graduated he presented himself at the New York Times, and was hired as a staff reporter after six months...
Whipping through Woollcott's early years, Boyden maintains a constant dialogue with the audience. He interjects Woollcott's acerbic, self-deprecatory observations with venomous barbs flung disarmingly into the audience. Boyden weaves together Woollcott's conflicting guises by slipping easily from Woollcotts-as-narrator to Woollcott-on-the-scene, as when he details his reaction to his father's death--a cold identification of a body on a slab; or to his sister's death--a slow, emotional reading of a letter to a mutual friend. This lachrymose, sentimental scene, which closes the first act, strikes an incongruous note amid...
MUCH OF THE SECOND HALF is devoted to a dramatic reading of Woollcott's criticism, an enviable talent he sharpened on the heads of playwrights, actors, friends, and other critics. Finding himself the butt of a rival's column, Woollcott retorted, "An empty taxi pulled up in front of the theater and George Gene Nathan got out." In a review of a play called Number 7, the playwright, he wrote, "has misjudged by five." In another, he suggested that "the lead actor be gently, but firmly, shot at dawn." Yet, he was as lavish in his praise...
...during the Depression. He travelled frequently, lecturing, observing, collecting anecdotes. Notoriously cheap, he "allowed" members of the organizations sponsoring his lectures to put him up for the night. His cutting rudeness as a guest inspired the George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart collaboration, The Man Who Came To Dinner. Woollcott's jabs seemed to delight him as much as they did his audience. Under Boyden's withering glares, they fall artfully in place...