Three plays · three phases · one life — designed to run in repertory or as a single-night marathon, in the tradition of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia at Lincoln Center (2006–2007).
The life of Barney Ebsworth has three genuinely distinct phases. The boy from a Depression-era Kingshighway flat who willed himself to France on a Proust novel is not the same person as the travel-industry tycoon running INTRAV and Royal Cruise Line and befriending Georgia O'Keeffe at Ghost Ranch. Neither is the same as the elderly widower at Hunts Point who wrote his own autobiography, married for the fourth and last time, and left a collection that would break the Hopper world auction record seven months after his death.
The material rejects a single-evening shape. It belongs on stage the way the Russian intelligentsia belonged on stage in Stoppard's trilogy — as a sequence of plays that can be seen separately, in any order, or consumed in a single long day in which the viewer is surprised to find themselves moved in three different ways by three different men who are, in the end, the same man.
Each play is constructed as a full two-act work, complete in itself, and designed to travel without the other two.
A single standing set serves all three plays. A scrim upstage on which projected photographs establish location and period (a streetcar passing on Kingshighway, the Eiffel Tower at dawn, the interior of the Louvre, the dealer's office on East 57th, Ghost Ranch at sunset, the Hunts Point living room with the paintings). Downstage, a set of modular platforms and a few key pieces of furniture that carry across decades: an army-surplus steel-frame bed; a 1950s French café table; a Mission-oak gallery chair; and, in Play III only, an easel on which Chop Suey rests, its canvas turned to the audience.
The effect is that the single physical space of the theater contains all the rooms of Barney's life, and the ghosts of each room appear in the next one.
An older Barney (played by a single actor across all three plays, and seated in a worn armchair upstage throughout) serves as the narrator. He is the man who wrote the 2012 autobiography. He interrupts. He rephrases. He sometimes disagrees with his younger self. Other actors play Barney at the relevant age in each scene, with the older Barney turning toward them from his armchair — and occasionally walking into the scene to correct a line.
This device is Stoppardian and efficient; it is also faithful to Barney's actual book, in which the sixty-eight-year-old writer frequently pauses to tell us what the twelve-year-old or twenty-two-year-old version of himself did not yet know.
The elder Barney should be played by an actor comfortable on stage for three plays' worth of sustained presence — he is in almost every scene, mostly silent, occasionally rising. The obvious casting is a British or British-trained actor in his sixties or seventies with the precise dry interiority Barney's prose voice carries. Colin Firth is the natural read, particularly given the loop that Firth played George VI in The King's Speech and Barney's own father Alec — himself a stutterer — privately idolized George VI for the same reason. The casting symmetry lands on stage the way it would on screen.