SANTA BARBARA THEATRE OF THE AIR Posts

Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.

Her successes in Hollywood include two Academy Award nominations, but her work there was curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics resulted in the being placed on the Hollywood blacklist.

In 1917, she met and married a Wall Street stockbroker, Edwin Pond Parker II, but they were soon separated by his army service in World War I. She had ambivalent feelings about her Jewish heritage, given the strong antisemitism of that era, and later joked that she married to escape her name.

Parker’s career took off in 1918 while she was writing theatre criticism for Vanity Fair, where she met Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood. The trio began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel on a near-daily basis and became founding members of what became known as the Algonquin Round Table, which included the newspaper columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott.

Through their publication of Parker’s lunchtime remarks and short verses, Dorothy began developing a national reputation as a wit. When the group was informed that famously taciturn former president Calvin Coolidge had died, Parker remarked, “How could they tell?”

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, Parker and Benchley were part of a “board of editors.”

Her best-known short story, “Big Blonde,” published in The Bookman magazine, was awarded the O. Henry Award as the best short story of 1929.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Parker became an increasingly vocal advocate of civil liberties and civil rights, and a frequent critic of authority figures. During the Great Depression, she was among numerous American intellectuals and artists who became involved in related social movements. She reported in 1937 on the Loyalist cause in Spain for the Communist magazine, The New Masses, and she helped to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936, which the FBI suspected of being a Communist Party front.

Parker was listed as a Communist by the publication Red Channels in 1950. Movie studio bosses placed her on the Hollywood blacklist. [PLEASE REVIEW OUR PODCAST: “LARRY PARKS’ DAY IN COURT”]

Parker died on June 7, 1967, of a heart attack. In her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King Jr. Following King’s death, her estate was bequeathed by his family to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Her ashes remained unclaimed in various places, including her attorney Paul O’Dwyer’s filing cabinet, for approximately 17 years. They are now in an urn buried beneath the floor of NAACP headquarters.

Her self-described obituary: “Pardon my dust.”

Here We Are, by Dorothy Parker (Playing time:  19:33)
Starring David Courtenay and Jamie Hixon

(When the wedding bells fade, the great adventure begins!)

Santa Barbara Theatre of the Air

Luigi Pirandello (28 June 1867 – 10 December 1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays.

Pirandello’s works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello’s tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd.

He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for “his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre.”

In 1894, following his father’s suggestion he married a shy, withdrawn girl educated by the nuns of San Vincenzo: Antonietta Portulano.

In 1903, the flooding of the sulphur mines of Aragona, in which Pirandello’s father Stefano had invested not only an enormous amount of his own capital but also Antonietta’s dowry, precipitated the collapse of the family. Antonietta, after opening and reading the letter announcing the catastrophe, entered into a state of semi-catatonia and underwent such a psychological shock that her mental balance remained profoundly and irremediably shaken.

In 1919 Pirandello had his wife placed in an asylum. Separation from her, despite her morbid jealousies and hallucinations, caused him great suffering; even as late as 1924, he believed he could still properly care for her at home. She never left the asylum.

Among Pirandello’s most famous plays: Right You Are (If You Think You Are) (1917); Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921); Henry IV (1922); Each in His Own Way (1924).

Our current production,The Man With the Flower in His Mouth (1922) is partly noteworthy for becoming, in 1930, the first piece of television drama ever to be produced in Britain, when a version was screened by the British Broadcasting Corporation.

In 1925, Pirandello, with the help of Mussolini, assumed the artistic direction and ownership of the Teatro d’Arte di Roma. He described himself as “a Fascist because I am Italian.” For his devotion to Mussolini, the satirical magazine Il Becco Giallo used to call him P. Randello (randello in Italian means club).

In 1927 he tore his fascist membership card to pieces in front of the startled secretary-general of the Fascist Party. For the remainder of his life, Pirandello was always under close surveillance by the secret fascist police.

Pirandello died alone in his home at Via Bosio, Rome.

The Man With the Flower in His Mouth, by Luigi Pirandello (Playing time: 20:30)
Starring William Smithers and Pope Freeman

(A casual conversation between strangers turns dark.)

Santa Barbara Theatre of the Air