Clothes for a Summer Hotel

directed by Cyndy A. Marion

 

Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Mr. Williams’ highly theatrical and evocative “ghost play”, imagines an ethereal final meeting between the restless ghosts of literary great F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Set on a windy hilltop at the gates of the Asheville, NC asylum where Zelda was institutionalized before her death by fire in 1948, a desperate Scott pleads for reconciliation while Zelda blames him for her failed writing career and ensuing madness. Taking extraordinary liberties with time and place, “Clothes” fuses the past, present and future as Zelda and Scott re-visit the Jazz Age of their youth on the French Riviera and the ghosts of characters, including Ernest Hemingway, who helped shape their existence. Williams had a life-long fascination with the Fitzgeralds. The tortures they faced as creative artists in a modern society paralleled his own. He identified directly with Scott’s early success and later disfavor and empathized with Zelda’s need to create and thwarted ambitions. He also had a special understanding and sympathy for Zelda’s madness, having witnessed his own sister’s struggles with schizophrenia. Clothes for a Summer Hotel, which opened at the Court Theatre on March 26, 1980 with Geraldine Page in the role of Zelda, was Mr. Williams’ last Broadway production. Other than a production mounted by the York Theater Company in 1995, the play has not been staged in New York City since. Despite the fact that many critics originally failed to appreciate Williams’ post-modern dreamscape, several recognized the potential of this “quintessentially American romance” (as described by Our Town’s Jeremy Gerard) acknowledging, as The New York Times’ Clive Barnes did, that “Clothes” was a play “whose time has not yet come.”