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Retired New York police officer Walter “Pops” Washington lives in a rent-controlled Riverside Drive apartment with his newly released son, Junior, Junior's girlfriend and a recovering addict. While facing possible eviction, Pops pursues a discrimination suit over having been accidentally shot by another officer.
The play, based on true events, is set in 1960 London. In his declining years, Orson Welles is directing a production of Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright. Olivier is fresh from his triumphant theatrical portrayal of vaudevillian Archie Rice in John Osborne's The Entertainer and is about to reprise the role in the film adaptation. He and Plowright are in the early stages of a romantic liaison; Olivier's tumultuous marriage to Vivien Leigh is all but ended. Critic Kenneth Tynan also figures in the plot, which debates the merits of stage versus screen, the internal struggle that theatrical performers endure when contemplating a leap to films, and the ways that the studio system frustrated the careers of individual artists. It is a study of theatrical egos, each of the protagonists living more on the stage than in real life, each one feeling insecure while jockeying for power.
Retired New York police officer Walter “Pops” Washington lives in a rent-controlled Riverside Drive apartment with his newly released son, Junior, Junior's girlfriend and a recovering addict. While facing possible eviction, Pops pursues a discrimination suit over having been accidentally shot by another officer.
The play, based on true events, is set in 1960 London. In his declining years, Orson Welles is directing a production of Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright. Olivier is fresh from his triumphant theatrical portrayal of vaudevillian Archie Rice in John Osborne's The Entertainer and is about to reprise the role in the film adaptation. He and Plowright are in the early stages of a romantic liaison; Olivier's tumultuous marriage to Vivien Leigh is all but ended. Critic Kenneth Tynan also figures in the plot, which debates the merits of stage versus screen, the internal struggle that theatrical performers endure when contemplating a leap to films, and the ways that the studio system frustrated the careers of individual artists. It is a study of theatrical egos, each of the protagonists living more on the stage than in real life, each one feeling insecure while jockeying for power.