PAPA Staged Reading Featuring Jeff Maschi June 28, 2008

8 PM, Fri. & Sat. June 27 & 28
Two Nights!! PAPA Staged Reading
Featuring Jeff Maschi
If Papa, John deGroot's unsparing dramatic portrait of Ernest Hemingway in his later years, has any degree of accuracy, the macho titan of 20th-century American fiction was one mean drunk. He was also a bully, a misogynist and a liar, obsessed with manliness and devoured by envy. Halfway into Papa, the character works himself into a competitive frenzy, grabs one of several hunting guns from the wall, and shoots, imagining William Faulkner as a game bird.Set in Hemingway's trophy-decorated home outside Havana in 1959, five years after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature and two years before his suicide by shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho, Papa coheres as the story of a man in pain. Without going into medical details, the play conveys the debilitating physical toll of all those macho exploits: the war wounds, plane crashes and car wrecks that facilitated his dependence on alcohol, his favorite general anesthetic. As the author desperately shadowboxes with literary ghosts and fires his gun (figuratively and literally) into the air, you feel the agony of a man whose body and soul are irreparably racked. (blurb excerpted from Stephen Holden's New York Times review of the 1996 Broadway production). FREE! Comp Wine.

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