Complaining in his apartment at 780 United Nations Plaza about a devastating demotion among New York City’s glitterati, Truman Capote (Jesse Tyler Ferguson, behaving like a whippet on the rampage) blurts that his stunningly crafted books no longer represent him. No, he trumpets during Christmas 1975, he’s now merely “famous for being famous.”
Pinned by Jay Presson Allen’s 1989 Tru, the rightfully acclaimed writer with the distinctive light-loafered voice carries on for 90 or so minutes as the flamboyant gossip he clearly relishes being. It all occurs in the brilliant setting that smart-as-a-whip director Rob Ashford chose: the spacious library in the House of the Redeemer on Manhattan’s natty Upper East Side. Missing only for this representation are the notorious United Nations Plaza windows.
Prominently placed among the Tru furnishings, including the desk where Tru claims he’s finishing Answered Prayers—which he insists will be his masterpiece, akin to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—is a luxurious divan (Mike Harrison is the designer). There he reclines several times, echoing the controversial Harold Halma photograph of a 23-year-old Capote that appeared on the back of his reputation-making first novel, the 1948 Other Voices, Other Rooms.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
At an indefatigable 51, Tru covers the room repeatedly during what could be called immersive theater. Sometimes he even shares a settee with patrons. As Christmas looms, he’s incensed reliving the scandal that’s set him back on his delicate heels: the November 1975 Esquire publication of “La Côte Basque 1965,” in which he chronicled a colorful lunch that socialites Gloria Vanderbilt and Carol Matthau didn’t enjoy in its entirety. Names are changed but not sufficiently for those in the immediate know and for whom the Answered Prayers chapter—sadly, the manuscript was never completed—became an agitated guessing game.
Why Babe Paley, Slim Keith, and the other Capote swans thought their friend Truman would never draw on them for his fiction and why, for his part, he believed they knew he was a writer and would eventually expose them on the printed page remains an intriguing at-cross-purposes question. And Allen may have it wrong at one tender Tru moment. Worried that he won’t hear from Babe Paley with Christmas wishes, here he receives a cheerful call. Evidently, he actually did not.
Confessing to copious drinking and doing plenty while spilling the juicy beans—at one point on the phone with his biographer Gerald Clarke—Capote gets around to many of the acclaimed events of his driven existence.
Perhaps the most publicized is the Black and White Ball he painstakingly threw at The Plaza on November 28, 1966, for an extravagant $75,000 ($750,000+ today). It remains considered by many as the party of the 20th century. (Take that, Anna Wintour.) There are probably some aging attendees who still talk about having been there. As it was a masked ball, they may report how much they paid for their designer masks. (Capote’s cost 39 cents.)
From the Tru get-go, a deliberately festive occasion prevails. Rather like one of the opening showgirl ghosts in Follies, Charlotte d’Amboise often wafts back and forth wearing a black-and-white ensemble (Sam Spector is the costume designer). The implication is that the ball is the lasting recollection of the pint-size writer’s public life.
Capote does speak of his writing—and, apparently, in apparently, his own words. He plucks In Cold Blood from a library shelf, flips through it and says no more than “how much it took out of me.” He’s undoubtedly referring to his becoming very close to death-row murderers Perry Smith and Richard Hitchcock, compulsively attending their hangings.
Capote reminisces about his Monroeville, Alabama, upbringing, particularly, at age 7, his best friend, 60-ish cousin Sook. He memorialized one of their shared moments as “A Christmas Memory,” which Hallmark adapted for television with Geraldine Page as Sook. He speaks candidly about his homosexual life, naming Jack Dunphy as his nearly 30-years-long friend and three-year lover.
Oddly, among his memories from those early years, he doesn’t name Harper Lee, now widely known for To Kill a Mockingbird but perhaps only slightly less recognized as another close Monroeville friend. Although he brings up Marilyn Monroe, he doesn’t say anything about the many times they spent together in Manhattan when he was at the United Nations Plaza and she was close by on East 57th Street.
Allen also has Capote’s take on the subject of fame, into which he’d deeply delved—and which is an especially American obsession. Here’s how he sums it up: “Fame is only good for one thing. They’ll cash your check in a small town.”
To describe Capote as self-involved is a laughable understatement. But thank the entertainment gods for that. He’s at his funniest throughout, and certainly when a Christmas gift of poinsettias is delivered, he’s an irate hoot. Miffed at the sender’s clichéd inspiration he utters: “I’m giving stuff from Tiffany’s, and I’m getting poinsettias.”
At the end of this theatrically frantic day, the boisterous fun has been contagious, though the more familiar a viewer is with the Capote’s life and works, the more rewarding the outing may be. As for this reviewer: He still regrets that his invitation to the Black and White Ball remains lost in the 1966 mail.
Tru opened March 19, 2026, at House of the Redeemer and runs through May 3. Tickets and information: truplaynyc.com
