Overview
The complex and dangerous friendship of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald with Ernest Hemingway is traced in this funny, surreal and dark play which presents their evolving attractions, entanglements, jealousies, conflicts, and madness. Scott worships Ernest and wishes he could be as strong a man and pure an artist as he imagines Ernest to be, but also tries to justify his sense that he has prostituted his talent to cheap popular magazines so he can finance the expensive life style Zelda needs. Ernest has some grudging respect for Scott's talent, but only contempt for the way Scott conducts his career and his life, and tries to convince Scott that Zelda is jealous of Scott's talent and secretly is trying to destroy him. Zelda loves Scott but thinks he behaves like a fool, and sees Ernest as a fake who is himself trying to destroy Scott. There is repressed sexual tension flying around in all directions, as the three of them work their way through an increasingly disturbing series of triangular struggles. Zelda's French lover keeps buzzing the house in his airplane. Ernest tries to convince Scott that Zelda should be put in a madhouse. Zelda makes fun of Ernest's exaggeratedly masculine pose, his passions for guns and bullfights, and his desperate ambition. They are strong and weak in turn, liars and truth tellers, mad and brilliant, each in their own way, and each is moving towards an inevitable self destruction that the others both facilitate and try to prevent. The play moves like an intense dream, a struggle over art, sex, fame, power and madness.