cover illustration by John Jinks
Peter Parnell
"...In HYDE IN HOLLYWOOD,
Mr Parnell argues that the dreams perpetrated by the dream
factory during the movies' golden age were as monstrous as
Harry's [the protagonist] nightmares, but far more lasting and
lethal.
Though his play is bounded by
glittering Brown Derby dinners and Grauman's Chinese premieres of
The Wizard of Oz and The Women, Mr Parnell quickly rips through
the M G M tinsel to dramatize the private cowardice of movie
makers all too willing to knuckle under to the reactionary
politics of a Louella Parsons or the severe prejudices of the
scandal-hungry ticket buyers. He wonders if Hollywood's more
frivolous screen fantasies might not have reflected that moral
abdication and helped foster the atmosphere that encouraged the
Nazis of all kinds to march in the real world, whether just
outside or well beyond the studio gates. `A nation lives by its
symbols' says the playwright. Implicit in HYDE IN HOLLYWOOD is
the belief that a braver thirties Hollywood might have helped produce
a more courageous nation than the one that was tardy in
mobilizing against Hitler in one generation and against Joseph
McCarthy in the next.
In ambition...HYDE IN HOLLYWOOD
is a fascinating piece with Mr Parnell's previous revisionist
look at American cultural iconography, ROMANCE LANGUAGE....
HYDE IN HOLLYWOOD shares its
thematic and actual landscape with familiar works of fiction
(Nathanael West's Day of the Locust), nonfiction (Neal Gabler's Empire
of Their Own), and gossip (Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon). Yet Mr. Parnell goes his own inventive way....
There have been few new plays
this year with as much to say as HYDE IN HOLLYWOOD, or with
potentially as intriguing a way to say it...."
Frank Rich, The New York
Times
originally produced by Playwrights Horizons, New York
14 M, 4 W
I S B N: 0-88145-090-1, $8.95