We got a message that there is a new production of Dorothy Parker material coming to a theatre in Pennsylvania. (It is close to Media, Pa., Delaware County Seat, and Swarthmore).
Dorothy Parker & Friends - One Perfect Rose Penelope Reed, David O'Connor & the Hedgerow Ensemble
Directed by David O'Connor January 8-27, 2008 - Heritage Series
Previews: Tuesday & Wednesday, Jan. 8-9 at 7:30 p.m.; Opens Jan. 10 with performances Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m. through Jan. 27; also Wednesday, Jan. 23 at 2 p.m.
Special Shows: Thursday, January 10 - Opening Night Meet-the-Cast Post-Show Party.
The degree of separation between Dorothy Parker and the president of France is 1. That would be Carla Bruni. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, took Bruni on a trip to Egypt over the Christmas holiday, stepping out into headlines with the stunning French-Italian supermodel/singer. Sarkozy recently announced he and his wife split up. With Bruni as the No. 1 girlfriend in the country, she will be even more famous.
How is this related to Parker? Bruni released the album No Promises early this year, which features Dorothy Parker verses on "Ballade at Thirty-Five" and "Afternoon" (in heavily-accented English) on the pop album.
She also samples three Emily Dickinson poems, along with W.H. Auden, William Butler Yeats, Walter de la Mare, and Christina Rosetti. The album is all dead poets set to French Pop.
Remarkably for a beautiful woman, the most successful tracks on the album are songs of loneliness and unrequited love: from the chilling precision of Emily Dickinson's 'I Felt My Life With Both My Hands', set against grungy electric guitars, to Bruni's wonderfully spiky reading of Dorothy Parker's 'Ballade at Thirty Five', with its weary refrain: 'I love them until they loved me.' But the album's masterpiece is Bruni's thrash-punk arrangement of Parker's 'Afternoon', in which a middle-aged woman anticipates the day when, post-desire, she'll have nothing but 'memory to share my bed / and peace to share my fire.'
What does this mean? Will the president of France now be exposed to Dorothy Parker poems? Parker always loved Paris and visiting France. Maybe now that the leader of the country is in bed with a beautiful Parker fan, we can look forward to more Parker exposure in France? Bruni has a string of famous ex-boyfriends.
If you figure out her web site, you can listen to the 2 Parker pieces under the "No Promises" section. Here is a video (in English) of Bruni talking about the the record and performing songs from it. She mentions Parker:
In exclusive Dorothy Parker Society news, Penguin Classics will be bringing out a new Parker book in May 2008. It is The Ladies of the Corridor, a play she wrote in 1953 in collaboration with Arnaud D'Usseau. The book has not been available in more than 50 years, and Penguin Classics is bringing it out in a new edition. It has an introduction written by Parker biographer Marion Meade.
For those not familiar with the play, it contains some of Parker's most trenchant observations and wicked dialogue. Set in a residential hotel in Manhattan's East Sixties, the main characters are widows and divorcee's who wile away their days and nights in a monotonous grind. The play did not do well on Broadway, running for just 45 performances in the fall of 1953 at the Longacre Theatre. However, Parker considered it among her best work and was extremely proud of it. Audiences in the 21st Century saw Ladies off-Broadway in 2003 and 2005, in a marvelous production mounted by the Peccadillo Theater Company. The New Yorker wrote that The Ladies of the Corridor, "proves that Parker was the mistress of much more than the acid one-liner." We will have more information about this classic book when the publication date draws closer.
Parker is also among the writers in the latest compilation from the New Yorker archives, Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink. The hardcover, 600-page book came out last month from Random House. Parker joins literary gastronomes Roald Dahl, Calvin Trillin, Bill Buford, Susan Orlean, Jane Kramer, and Anthony Bourdain. The book is on this page.
