Committee:
Dr. Steve Feffer, Chair
Dr. Jon Adams
Dr. Cynthia Klekar
Dr. Terry Williams

Date: Thursday, March 1, 2012 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
3025 Brown Hall

Abstract:
The Jazz Age and the Gilded Age collide in Tea with Edie and Fitz, a play that chronicles the tempestuous meeting of literary icons Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald at her estate for tea in the 1920s. In scenes that jump backward and forward chronologically and that span the entire globe (from glittering expatriate Paris to roaring post-WWI Manhattan), the play examines the lives of two authors at the height of their powers and imagines what may have happened in that meeting that led them to never speak again. Particular attention is also paid to Fitzgerald's relationship with his beautiful and troubled Southern wife Zelda and Wharton's with the ghost of her mentor and longtime companion Henry James, calling into question the nature of gender, sanity, time, the purpose of art, and the nature of love and loss.

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