Rich and Famous

THE STORY: One of the world's oldest living promising young playwrights, Bing Ringling is finally about to be produced-with play number 844. But, unfortunately, his lady producer, having had a series of successes, now yearns for a flop-so she can savor the sweet taste of failure and then make a comeback. Hoping to salvage his play, Bing tries to enlist the aid of his boyhood friend Tybalt Dunleavy, now a Hollywood star, but he too is having something of an identity crisis. Bing's odyssey leads on to hilarious confrontations with his musical collaborator Anatol Torah (a wildly spaced-out composer); his oddball parents (who still cherish his dirty diapers); and his old girlfriend (now unhappily married and mired in the past). Thereafter the phantasmagoria continues until, in the end, and as Clive Barnes puts it: Bing is at the still center of his own nightmare, wandering like Ulysses through the cavernous passages of his life and finally determining just what it costs to be rich and famous.Guare, John is the author of 'Rich and Famous ', published 1977 under ISBN 9780822209492 and ISBN 0822209497.