Biography: A Comedy in Three Acts

by S.N. Behrman

The plot is set in motion when a young highly principled editor who hates everything about Marion's world but sees the commercial value of a tell-all for his gossip driven magazine persuades her to write a memoir. Given that she's in a fallow period, the $2000 advance offered (during this depression year of 1932 that was enough to feed a whole family for a year) plus the idea that revisiting her past would be fun and enlightening, she agrees. The girlhood lover who's recently reappeared in her life, is appalled by her memoir writing which he sees as a threat to his impending U.S. Senate campaign. A more recent lover, a self-absorbed hammy actor, sees it as an opportunity for publicizing himself. Not surprisingly, the young editor, like everyone who basks in the warmth of Marion's sunny personality, also succumbs to her charm. Others in the service of either adding to the memoir-induced complications or resolving them are a Viennese composer friend, the would-be Senator's fiancee and her rich and powerful father. Oh, and, of course, a devoted maid.

Genres: Plays

252 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

Samuel Nathaniel Behrman was an American playwright, screenwriter, biographer, and longtime writer for The New Yorker. His son is the composer David Behrman.

Reviews

[Martin Denton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The heroine of Biography is Marion Froude, a woman of about 40 who has been living a free-spirited, Bohemian life as an artist and friend (and perhaps more?) to the great and near-great for quite a while now. On the November afternoon in the mid-1930s when the play begins, Marion receives three unexpected visitors, all of whom will alter her life's immediate course before the play is ended. The first is her dear friend Melchior Feydak, a European composer. He's in New York en route to Hollywood, where a movie contract awaits; it's implied that he's fleeing the looming Nazi menace.

The second is Leander Nolan, a very old friend; indeed, it was Bunny (as she playfully calls him) who was Marion's first love, long ago in Tennessee. Marion has left those Southern roots behind her, but Nolan has cultivated his, and he's now planning to run for the U.S. Senate and to marry the daughter of a powerful newspaper magnate named Kinnicott.

The third--who actually had an appointment, but Marion's not the type to remember appointments--is an earnest young man called Richard Kurt, who has a proposition for our heroine. He is the editor of a magazine called "Every Week" and he wants to serialize Marion's memoirs. He thinks that her unconventional and potentially racy life story will sell. Marion, initially put off by the idea, decides writing her biography will be a worthy challenge. But--and you saw this coming--Leander/Bunny is aghast. He can't afford to appear in a book such as the one Marion will write. Complications ensue.

Interestingly--and this is one of the great strengths of this play--the complications never get terribly complicated. Biography is essentially a screwball comedy, but it's a screwball comedy of ideas. Plot matters less to Behrman than content, and he covers a great deal of ground in this piece, giving both of Marion's "suitors" equal time, and also giving Marion plenty of room to be as heroic as we know she is. For example, here's what she says to Bunny when he asks her not to continue with her biography:

MARION: Bunny darling, it's true that Dickie's magazine isn't the Edinburgh Review. On the other hand your assumption that my story will be vulgar and sensational is a little gratuitous, isn't it?
NOLAN: You refuse then?
MARION: Yes. This--censorship before publication seems to me, shall we say, unfair. It is--even in an old friend--dictatorial.

And here she is, going head-to-head with babbitty Kinnicott:

KINNICOTT: I haven't changed my ideas in twenty-five years.
MARION: Haven't you really? How very steadfast. Now if the world were equally changeless, how consistent that would make you.

Marion is a grand character, Auntie Mame with authentic heart and humanity. She's chic, she's sophisticated, she's smart, she's loving, and she's dazzlingly self-aware. The ending, which I won't give away, is both surprising and wondrously affirming.

Behrman populates the play with a number of eccentric characters who would feel right at home in a Kaufman & Hart comedy of the same period. In addition to the charming Feydak, we meet a Barrymore-esque matinee idol named Warwick Wilson, the impossibly stuffy and pompous Kinnicott (and his unexpectedly modern daughter), and Marion's brusque Teutonic maid, Minnie. The scene with Wilson is nonstop hilarious, as is Marion's battle with Kinnicott, which brings to mind the great denouement of Auntie Mame but was written two decades earlier.

The piece and its sentiments prove timeless, though perhaps in one sense also hopelessly dated: throughout, everyone in the story is unfailingly polite to everyone else, even those whose points of view they adamantly despise. The world isn't like that anymore.

[Nicolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is very entertaining small cast (5m, 3f), simple set comedy. Marion is a fun characters. She is bold and unapologetic. The plot zigs and zags and ultimately goes in a direction that I didn't expect. The dialogue is crisp and moves at a good pace.