Nobody Loves an Albatross
by Ronald Alexander

THE STORY: As Walter Kerr of the New York Herald-Tribune describes the play and its central character: ”He's a producer and writer of television serials, except that he doesn't really write any serials, they're written by frostbitten spastics he keeps in closets, and he really doesn't produce anything either, he just keeps dancing around his living room pretending to be as many other people as possible.

Sometimes he is Toulouse Lautrec, popping stubby-kneed from his hiding-place behind the black leather furniture, sometimes he is Michelangelo, bestowing a kiss upon himself in the mirror, sometimes he is Father Christmas, sometimes he is Jack the Ripper, and always he is Ananias, the man who cannot tell a lie.

'This is my art form!' He coos in loving self-congratulation as he opens his arms to embrace the ersatz universe he has spun out of whole cloth, a universe in which busy people come and go to listen to his quick and glossy fabrications before interrupting him to articulate theirs.”

Included in this amazing array of visiting frauds are the hard-driving studio owner who delights in brow-beating the creative souls beholden to her; a calculating lady comedy writer whose contempt for her nationwide audience is matched only by her shrewdness in pleasing them; and a conniving agent forever on the lookout for another victim to corrupt.

Circling about them are a quaking ghost writer and our hero's private secretary—two innocently honest souls trapped in a nest of vipers.