New York City
The Blue Light Theater Company will complete its 1999-2000 season with Philip Barry’s, Hotel Universe. This drama weaves a complicated history of hope and denial into an engrossing portrait of the Lost Generation. The opening lines of Fitzgerald’s 1934 masterpiece Tender Is The Night take us to the setting of the play, “on the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed facade, and before it stretches short, dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people.” Those notables include; Sarah and Gerald Murphy, Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker. John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeash and Philip Barry himself. In the aftermath of WWI, these expatriate Americans conjure their pasts and examine the present in an endeavor to connect with each other and the world around them.