Phoenix Festival DIGITAL Playbill 2024 (2) - Flipbook - Page 28
Grove Goddess Productions presents:
THE PORTABLE
DOROTHY PARKER
By Annie Lux
Directed by Lee Costello
Performed by Margot Avery
Place: 1943, a midtown residential hotel in New York City
Run time: It will be performed without intermission
Dorothy Parker was an American poet, writer, critic, and, screenwriter. Famed
for her biting wit, she was born Dorothy Rothschild on August 22, 1893, in Long
Branch, NJ, and grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She sold her 昀椀rst
poem in 1916, which lead to a job at Vanity Fair, where she met humorist Robert
Benchley and (eventual) award-winning playwright Robert Sherwood. The three
friends attended the lunch party for Alexander Woollcott in June of 1919 that
began the ten-year tradition that would come to be known as the Algonquin
Round Table, a group of writers, editors, and actors whose sharp-tongued banter
was chronicled in the popular newspaper columns of the day.
She was a founding contributing editor at The New Yorker, which published
many of her poems and short stories, as well as her many book reviews as
Constant Reader. Her most famous story, “Big Blonde,” won the O. Henry Prize
in 1929. Dorothy married Edwin Pond Parker, a Wall Street banker, in 1917. Separated for most of their marriage by the First World War, they eventually divorced
in 1928. She married Alan Campbell in 1934; the pair spent many years writing
screenplays in Hollywood, including the 1937 A Star is Born. She and Alan divorced in 1947, and remarried in 1950. Alan died in their West Hollywood home
in 1964. A life-long activist, Mrs. Parker helped found the Screenwriters Union
as well as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, and was blacklisted as a suspected
Communist during the McCarthy era. She died in New York on June 7, 1967,
leaving her literary estate to Martin Luther King, Jr., whom she had never met but
greatly admired. When Dr. King was assassinated less than a
year later, the estate passed to the NAACP.
SCAN FOR FULL PROGRAM>
