‘Ghost-Writer’ at Metro Stage

Published May 2, 2013 4:00am ET



MetroStage’s final play of the 2012-2013 season is a witty, wry, enigmatic comedy by Michael Hollinger that muses on the process of writing, from the inception of idea to the choice of punctuation. A light-hearted homage to the novelist Henry James and his relationship with his typist, Theodora Bosanquet, Hollinger’s “Ghost-Writer” is about a fictional writer, Franklin Woolsey (Paul Morella) who dies, but after his death, his typist, Myra Babbage (Susan Lynskey), continues to take dictation, writing in Woolsey’s voice and style, to the confusion of all who knew the writer, particularly Woolsey’s widow, Vivian (Helen Hedman).

The play, which takes place in 1919, begins with Myra recalling how her employer used to give her dictation as he stared out the window at the Queensboro Bridge. She recounts his various moods and silences and shows how she learned to accompany the writer on the typewriter as precisely as a pianist would accompany a singer. Theirs is a love story of the most unconventional, rarefied kind.

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