Hyde in Hollywood

Though his play is bounded by glittering Brown Derby dinners and Grauman's Chinese premieres of THE WIZARD OF OZ and THE WOMEN, Mr Parnell quickly rips through the M-G-M tinsel to dramatize the private cowardice of movie makers all too willing to knuckle under to the reactionary politics of a Louella Parsons or the severe prejudices of the scandal-hungry ticket buyers

He wonders if Hollywood's more frivolous screen fantasies might not have reflected that moral abdication and helped foster the atmosphere that encouraged the Nazis of all kinds to march in the real world, whether just outside or well beyond the studio gates

`A nation lives by its symbols' says the playwright. Implicit in HYDE IN HOLLYWOOD is the belief that a braver 30s Hollywood might have helped produce a more courageous nation than the one that was tardy in mobilizing against Hitler in one generation and against Joseph McCarthy in the next.

In ambition...HYDE IN HOLLYWOOD is a fascinating piece with Mr Parnell's previous revisionist look at American cultural iconography, ROMANCE LANGUAGE....

HYDE IN HOLLYWOOD shares its thematic and actual landscape with familiar works of fiction (Nathanael West's DAY OF THE LOCUST), nonfiction (Neal Gabler's EMPIRE OF THEIR OWN), and gossip (Kenneth Anger's HOLLYWOOD BABYLON). Yet Mr. Parnell goes his own inventive way....

There have been few new plays this year with as much to say as HYDE IN HOLLYWOOD, or with potentially as intriguing a way to say it" ~ Frank Rich, The New York Times

Originally produced by Playwrights Horizons in New York - M14,F4