What Fresh Hell Is It? takes an always amusing two-hour dive into the very quotable, witty writing of the American Dorothy Parker
The monologue, written and directed by Glenn T Griffin, opens with her waking on the sofa. There are bottles of alcohol scattered about the room, and she immediately starts drinking as she speaks in a gloomy, perhaps hungover mood.
She tells us "I like to have a Martini, two at the very most. After three I'm under the table, after four I'm under my host." Unhappy with her life, she suggests that a person “should be young or dead... Why should we grow old... we should die gracefully at 56.” We hear that she attempted suicide five times.
Soon, the scene shifts back to her younger, more hopeful self, newly appointed as a copywriter for a magazine. Over the course of the play, she talks to her first husband, Eddie Parker, her second husband, Alan Campbell, her friend Robert Benchley and occasionally directly to the audience.
There is a touch of mischief to many of Dorothy Parker’s amusing comments. Even before the play begins, we hear a voice saying of a performance by Katherine Hepburn that she “ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.” That remark is repeated later by Carol Parradine, who plays Dorothy Parker.
Although many of her theatre criticisms became popular talking points, they irritated influential people to such an extent that they resulted in her sacking from Vanity Fair. Benchley, who worked for the same magazine, resigned in protest. She claims that “the life of a theatrical critic is a dog’s life.”
This well-performed piece with its multitude of short satirical comments is entertaining and never dull. But it can appear a slightly old-fashioned, one-note stand-up comedy by a depressed female literary critic overly concerned about her relationship with men.
Dorothy Parker was much more than that. She developed a strong sense of social justice, leading her to help found the Screen Writers’ Guild and support the Civil Rights Movement, leaving her estate to Martin Luther King Jr. and, on his death, to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Her left-wing politics resulted in her being arrested at a protest, investigated by the FBI and, during the McCarthyite witchhunts, blacklisted by Hollywood. Some of that could have found its way into the show.
She deserves to be remembered as more than a witty writer.