A disturbing little piece at the Finborough in Halley Feiffer's
I’m Gonna Pray
For You So Hard, another American play about writing but dealing with a
different popular opinion about the profession than
Sex With Strangers did: Laura
Eason's play was about the writer as part of some noble calling; Feiffer's subject
is the writer as damaged goods, the Hemingway model of the alcoholic genius and the
idea that the better the writer, the worse the human being. By that logic David
(Adrian Lukis) must be an amazing writer: A celebrated playwright, he has a single
daughter, Ella (Jill Winternitz,) whom he had late in life with his second wife.
Ella is an actress who's just opened as Masha in a prestige revival of
The Seagull,
but her father wastes no opportunity to mention that getting any role other than
Nina makes her a failure. It's Press Night but instead of waiting with the rest of
the cast for the reviews, she's getting drunk at home with David.
