Side Man

The Tony Award-winning play Side Man is narrated by the son of a jazz trumpeter. While the son admires his father’s artistry and enjoys the wit of his devoted fellow musicians, he resents his father’s near-total neglect of his family. And if the son is rueful, the trumpeter’s wife (a role created by Edie Falco) is furious. Flashbacks to the relatively happy time before the son’s birth–and before the decline of the big bands –provide a poignant, lyrical counterpoint to the events of the later years: the father’s increasingly tenuous career and the mother’s descent into alcoholism and madness.