This is Back Stage's review of the show's initial run at the Parker Theatre in May of this year.
"She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B," Dorothy Parker once said of Katharine Hepburn. Such is not a fault of author-performer Carol Lempert in That Dorothy Parker, running at the coincidentally named Parker Theatre, presented by the coincidentally named Algonquin Theater Productions.
Lempert plays the legendarily witty Parker, who lunched at the famous Round Table of the Algonquin Hotel with the likes of Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, and Robert Benchley, as a vulnerable, emotional creature. Lempert is such an excellent mimic that she seems, well, like an actor. But becoming Woollcott and other writer-critics is more a conceit of the one-person format than a choice supported by the play's slender frame. Still, though Lempert's impersonations are often overdone, they do add color.
It is 1943 and Parker is trying to write a eulogy for the acerbic Woollcott — who inspired the character of the boorish Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner and who Parker nicknamed Mother — before his memorial that afternoon. When Parker comes downstairs from her room at the Algonquin to get her dog some treats, she encounters a crowd eager to hear her memories. That's it for plot; it's pretty certain that at some point Parker will stop talking and get ready for the funeral.
Director Janice Goldberg would have done better to rein Lempert in. Overemotional outbursts of hitting the wall and jumping up and down are jarring. And having Lempert recite the more famous quips — on martinis: "After three, I'm under the table; after four, I'm under the host" — in dramatically dimmed lighting undercuts their tossed-off appeal.
Though Lempert's Parker sparkles more than she glares, sharing cocktails and wisecracks with this woman so ahead of her time does make for an agreeable evening.
Presented by Artistic New Directions as part of the New York International Fringe Festival at the SoHo Playhouse, 15 Vandam St., NYC. Aug. 10-24. Remaining performances: Wed., Aug. 20, 3 p.m.; Sun., Aug. 24, noon. (212) 279-4488 or (866) 468-7619 or www.fringenyc.org.