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Article Excerpt
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HERE'S A TYPICAL YEAR IN THE LIFE of Arthur Laurents:
After directing Patti LuPone on Broadway in what was widely hailed as the greatest Gypsy of all time, he immediately started to work on a new, bilingual West Side Story. When it opened, John Lahr wrote in The New Yorker that this West Side is "so exciting it makes you ache with pleasure." In his spare moments he finished his second memoir, Mainly on Directing: Gypsy, West Side Story, and Other Musicals, and completed another new play, New Year's Eve, which opened at the George Street Playhouse in New Jersey less than a month after his new West Side Story made its Broadway debut.
This would be a stupendous degree of productivity for anyone in his 30s or 40s.
But here's the thing: Arthur Laurents is 91.
New Year's Eve is about the ambiguous sexuality of married people and features a married man (played by Keith Carradine) who has an affair late in life with his accountant (Peter Frechette). During an early reading of the play before Broadway glitterati, Laurents realized that the equivocal lives of several of the couples in the audience had been replicated in his play. "It didn't occur to me that one didn't mention these things," Laurents told me. At the end of the reading, Mike Nichols turned to Laurents and declared, "You're the only honest man in New York."
In real life that compulsive honesty has led to some famous blowups between Laurents and everyone from lifelong collaborator Stephen Sondheim (they're barely speaking at the moment) to fellow playwright Larry Kramer (they don't speak at all). When a writer for New York magazine called Laurents's former longtime friend Mary Rodgers to interview her for a profile of the playwright, she was still so angry at him for something he had said to her at a dinner party years ago, her only comment was "Call me back when...
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