THE STORY: One of “the world’s oldest living promising young playwrights,” Bing Ringling is finally about to be produced—with play number 844. But, unfortunately, his lady producer, having had a series of successes, now yearns for a flop—so she can savor the sweet taste of failure and then make a comeback. Hoping to salvage his play, Bing tries to enlist the aid of his boyhood friend Tybalt Dunleavy, now a Hollywood star, but he too is having something of an identity crisis. Bing’s odyssey leads on to hilarious confrontations with his musical collaborator Anatol Torah (a wildly spaced-out composer); his oddball parents (who still cherish his dirty diapers); and his old girlfriend (now unhappily married and mired in the past). Thereafter the phantasmagoria continues until, in the end, and as Clive Barnes puts it: “Bing is at the still center of his own nightmare, wandering like Ulysses through the cavernous passages of his life and finally determining just what it costs to be rich and famous."
A bitingly funny satire by one of our theatre’s most inventive playwrights.
“Mr. Guare’s wit is really delightful…But even better than his humor is his rich and unusual sense of fantasy.” —The New York Times.
“Mr. Guare is not only a sleight-of-hand artist but a sleight-of-ear artist, so his characters and the words they speak are full of merry surprises.” —The New Yorker.
“As pure comedy RICH AND FAMOUS is like a funhouse maze…the best morsels of American comedy served anywhere.” —Newsweek.
