Plot
The play focuses on writers Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, who reunite in hell and reflect on their decades-long antagonistic relationship. Dating back to their first meeting at a conference at Sarah Lawrence College in 1948, it came to a head in 1980 when McCarthy, in a television interview with Dick Cavett, asserted every word written by her rival, including "and" and "the," was a lie. Hellman subsequently sued McCarthy for slander. As the play progresses, the two women recall, among other things, Hellman's 1952 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, McCarthy's childhood abuse by an uncle, and their romantic involvements, McCarthy with Philip Rahv and Hellman with Dashiell Hammett. Throughout it all, McCarthy accuses Hellman of repeatedly presenting fiction as fact, while Hellman insists McCarthy always portrays fact as fiction.
Read more about this topic: Imaginary Friends (play)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)