What Fresh Hell Can This Be?

The Portable Dorothy Parker is a one-woman play that tells the life of the legendary critic through her best one liners. The play has played at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and it just wrapped up a three-night stand at West Seattle’s Kenyon Hall, it’s Pacific Northwest premiere.

The Portable Dorothy Parker stars Margot Avery as the writer who is working with an unnamed and unseen editor to put together a compilation of her poems and stories, called appropriately enough, The Portable Dorothy Parker. Avery is quite good in the part, taking on many of Parker’s witticisms. Annie Lux is the playwright and she clearly reveres Parker (so do I). The script was a story told around the greatest hits of Parker’s Wikiquote page. It’s fun and funny because it, I think, captures Parker gossiping about her friends, peers, and rivals.

The play’s greatest strength, I think, is its self-awareness. It often references that Parker was attributed to saying many witty things that were actually uttered by others.

Overall, the play is enjoyable, and Avery melds into Parker beautifully. The problem, though, is that the play isn’t great.

Kenyon Hall is a little jewel of a theater off of 35th Street in West Seattle. Eddie Vedder played there before. Everything at the snack bar is $1, including the quite-good root beer floats. It’s an old building (It has a plaque above the entrance that says “On this site in 1897, nothing happened,” which is, apparently, a pre-Internet meme. Weird.) that also predates air conditioning. To get tickets, I had to e-mail Kenyon Hall and ask for a reservation and then play cash or check (!!) at the door. Their website has a link to Mapquest that will, if followed, take you to Pioneer Square.

The crowd, overwhelmingly elderly, seemed to have been completely unaware of just how quotable Parker was, and is. There was uproarious laughter whenever Margot Avery recited one of Parker’s famous quips. The script often felt like a creative writing exercise of writing a play built around quotes that Dorothy Parker might’ve said. I kept picturing a brainstorming session with Parker’s most famous attributions on 3x5" postcards, moveable for convenience. (“You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think;” “It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.”)

I’ve read Marion Meade’s biography of Parker, as well as a few other books where she’s a subject, so I don’t think there was anything new to be learned for Parker fans. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a fun time, because it certainly was. As my heroine said before (and whose quote appeared in The Portable Dorothy Parker), “There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.” There’s a lot of wise-cracking in The Portable Dorothy Parker, but calisthenics are good for you.