Posts From Author: tennessee williams

Capote’s Undoing

I’ve never been psychoanalyzed… I’ve never even consulted a psychiatrist… I work out all my problems in my work. — Truman Capote By the time Capote died, at the age of fifty-nine in 1984, years of substance abuse had shrunk his brain. His last completed book was In Cold Blood eighteen years previously. A heavily trailed follow-up, Answered Prayers, appeared in fragments so poisonous that the Park Avenue ladies whose adoration he’d cultivated for so long made a mass exodus from Mount Truman. His later years were characterised, in the words of William Todd Schultz, by “Studio 54, cocaine, prescription pills, Stoli vodka in an unmarked glass”. In a disastrous and notorious TV interview with Stanley Siegel, an evidently fried Capote confessed that his problems with alcohol and drugs would mean that “eventually I’ll kill myself… without meaning to…” Shortly before his death, he bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, knowing that his time was short. He died in the arms of his friend Joanne Carson. Schultz’s psychobiographical Tiny Terror: Why Truman Capote (Almost) Wrote Answered Prayers (Oxford University Press, 2011) puts Capote’s spectacular implosion under the microscope, finding in his early life the blueprint for his early death. Answered Prayers was […]
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The Bon Mots of Michael Riedel

Nothing generates as much excitement around town as a smash hit musical. Or, if you’re a bit of a vulture (and I am), a complete fiasco wherein millions of dollars are lost, people are at one another’s throats and reputations are ruined. — Michael Riedel, in an article from September 2003 Michael Riedel was our guest at last week’s Seriously Entertaining “Are You For Sale?” at City Winery. He spoke with wit and love of the late Jacques le Sourd, a critic-colleague of his whom he had known for many years. (In)famous for his outspoken, occasionally outrageous criticism, Riedel has worked as theatre critic for the New York Post for more than 15 years. To celebrate his SpeakEasy debut, we take a look at his work in the Post and on his PBS show Theater Talk. ‘Bullets Over Broadway’ on target to kill at Tonys A recent one to kick off, covering the musical adaptation of Woody Allen’s 1994 movie Bullets Over Broadway, which is currently in previews at the St. James Theatre. Part of what makes Riedel’s work so entertaining is his acknowledgement of his own reputation. It was there in his work on the TV show Smash, whose […]
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Why We Fight: Body Counts, Surviving the Plague, and the Angels in America

There’s a poster currently on display in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building advertising a “MASSIVE PROTEST” to “STOP THE CHURCH” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It’s almost twenty-five years old but quite as shocking as it was in 1989. In fact, pretty much all the material in the New York Public Library‘s moving exhibition “Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism” has retained its direct, visceral power. The famous “Silence = Death” posters, which reappropriate the pink triangles used by the Nazis to brand gay men, are still highly provocative. So too are the numerous works on display by artists’ collective Gran Fury, including the “New York Crimes” front pages that sought to readdress a perceived imbalance in news coverage of the AIDS crisis, and the memorable pin badges that read “Men: Use Condoms or Beat It”. NYPL, which preserves the archives of a range of activist organisations and key individuals, has done a magnificent job in presenting the early grassroots response to the epidemic. The exhibition is also a timely reminder that AIDS is an ongoing crisis. The horror I felt reading on one poster “One AIDS death every thirty minutes!” was magnified by an editorial caption bringing this stat up to date: […]
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