When all the moving parts align, a work of theater can be a thing of magic. But magic can happen in the presence of towering talent even when alignment fails. Matthew Lombardo’s When Playwrights Kill, inspired by his past experience with a hugely difficult leading lady, never coheres thematically or stylistically, and may leave a sour taste in some mouths. But the scintillating sextet assembled in Boston to deliver it – including three Tony winners – manage to deliver a diverting evening full of smiles and then some.
The Broadway hopeful is four-walling it all this week at the Huntington Theater, which some seven years ago hosted a well-publicized tryout debacle that led to Faye Dunaway’s being dismissed from playing Katharine Hepburn in Lombardo’s solo play Tea at Five. Hepburn is here turned into the legendary “Evelyn Parker,” and Dunaway becomes the unhinged Brooke Remington (Beth Leavel, Tony for The Drowsy Chaperone). Our playwright-narrator Jack Hawkins (Matt Doyle, Tony for Company) walks us from early misgivings through weeks of unmemorized lines, missed cues and arbitrarily-cut pages; pill-popping sessions (hers not his); shit-fits (from both); and his ultimate vow at intermission to murder his meal ticket. Present at the creation are producer (Adam Heller), director (Kevin Chamberlin), and long-suffering stage manager – aren’t all s.m.’s long-suffering? – Marissa Jaret Winokur, Hairspray Tony winner.
Throw in Tomás Matos as a flamboyant prompter/assistant/drug dealer (doesn’t every show need one?), and you have a recipe for mirth that rarely flags, even when the jokes fall flat and character logic flies out the window. You can’t take your eyes off Leavel as she propels voice and body into impossibly hilarious feats, even if it’s hard to accept her doddering diva suddenly turning into a sinister sneak. Doyle earns our affection, though it’s never clear why he’s so willing to jeopardize a massive cash windfall just to have his star done away with. Or let’s make that, dun-away with! Chamberlin, Winokur and Heller are particularly successful at maintaining character and dignity throughout, while Matos is so off-the-wall funny that you accept, or I did anyway, whatever he dishes out. Director Noah Himmelstein clearly knows that the savage revenge plot doesn’t mesh with the sentimental valentines to the-ay-ter that Lombardo keeps tossing in (each character gets a “serious” moment, like as not to bring things to a thud), so he’s taken the only proper course: have everyone play the stakes as super-high, and keep things bright and snappy.
As act two trundled along, ever more over-the-top and unlikely in its details, I couldn’t figure out why that snappy brightness was curdling unsavory. Until I got home, that is, to finish the last pages of Liza Minnelli’s new showbiz-and-addiction memoir, and watched some more of Faye, the documentary in which the Network Oscar-winner reveals a lifelong bipolar condition. It was hard not to think that great-stars-in-decline might merit a certain measure of gratitude on our part, and not be parodied as vulgar figures of fun, not employed to air a playwright’s ire that a narcissist isn’t doing justice to his chef d’oeuvre. How crass have our tastes become? Are we so inured to seeing the worst in others, particularly celebrities, that the notion of kindness and understanding in the face of personal weakness is a thing of the past?
I hope not. Our narrator keeps referencing another real-life theatrical kerfuffle, when Mary Tyler Moore walked out of Rose’s Dilemma. (A curt intermission note from playwright Neil Simon, delivered second-hand, was an unbearable humiliation to an ill actress striving to learn her lines and do well.) Clearly both Simon and Lombardo had axes to grind, especially given that Dunaway got great notices at the Huntington while the script was panned. (You can look it up.) Still, from time to time, Lombardo evinces a smidgin of sympathy for the proud but troubled artiste on whose fragile shoulders his entire work rested. Though he’s obviously entitled to write whatever he wants, I wonder whether he ever considered crafting a serious roman à clef in which to treat the Tea at Five experience with more objectivity and grace. I bet it would kill.
When Playwrights Kill opened April 10, 2026, at the Huntington Theatre (Boston) and runs through April 18. Tickets and information: whenplaywrightskillboston.com
