What Fresh Hell Is It? – The Libra Theatre Cafe

In Glenn T. Griffin’s engaging and insightful one-woman bioplay What Fresh Hell Is It?, the poet, short story writer, critic, and satirist Dorothy Parker quotes a line attributed to Charlie Chaplin. She says, “Life is a tragedy when held in close-up and a comedy when seen from afar”. It is an appropriate aphorism here. There is tragedy aplenty in Parker’s life, including depression, alcoholism, infidelities, a bitterly regretted abortion, and multiple suicide attempts. But there is comedy aplenty, too.

Parker’s way of gaining distance or perspective, at least in Griffin’s reading, is through the biting wit and elegant, pensive melancholy of her prose. She wakes in the morning to “brush her teeth and sharpen her tongue” and writes her pain away. The writer, flawlessly portrayed by a marvellously committed Carol Parradine, emerges as complex, contradictory, and immensely vulnerable. Griffin’s reading of his protagonist, of whom he clearly knows his stuff, carries a ring of emotional truth. Scene transitions deliver much welcome recorded snippets of Parker’s witticisms and sharply observed poetry.

What Fresh Hell Is It? follows the familiar dramatic arc of a standard biographical play. An aged Parker awakes on the sofa of her New York hotel, hungover and with heavy eyelids, reflecting on the life she has led. “People should be one of two things, young or dead,” she tells us at one point, and here she is far closer to the latter than the former. As if taunted by her dust-covered typewriter in the corner of the room, the writer then embarks on a flashback excursion into her legacy, regrets, and achievements. “Did I say anything consequential?” she ponders, directing most of her subsequent musings at the unseen presence of close friend and fellow writer Robert Benchley. The format is recognisable but here rendered effectively – a suitable tribute to a writer who despises literature that “shoves symbolism up the reader’s ass”.

Griffin takes us through Parke’s early career as an advertising copywriter, columnist for Vogue, and later drama critic for Vanity Fair, where she famously writes of Katharine Hepburn’s performance in a play, “She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B”.  She becomes the only female member of Algonquin Round Table, a celebrated group of New York City authors, critics, and actors, “Mary Magdalen at the Last Supper” is how she describes her presence.

In the 1930s, Parker turns to Hollywood, writing screenplays with her infamously bisexual second husband, Alan Campbell, of whom she is said to have quipped, “Alan was everything I ever wanted in a man — except that he was also everything I ever wanted in a woman”. Parker’s final years are spent in Scotch-sodden decline in New York. Griffin’s narrative curiously omits much reference to her political activism, which results in Parker being blacklisted during the McCarthy era.

Parradine’s Parker, rarely without a drink in hand, is both dissolute and morally courageous: a harridan if in the grip of a forty-year self-induced hangover that just won’t quit. One would not necessarily want to get into a slanging match with her, but she is a marvel to behold, nonetheless.

Writer and Director:  Glenn T. Griffin