Molly Smith Metzler, a playwright who lives in the Heights with fellow theater scribe Colin McKenna, is featured in a Sunday Los Angeles Times profile January 22. Her play “Elemeno Pea,” opens Feb. 3 at South Coast Repertory. The Tony-winning professional company in Costa Mesa, Calif., is regarded as one of America’s foremost producers of new works.
“Pea” is based on a woman she met while working at a yacht club on Martha’s Vineyard soon after college. “Everyone hated her. She was so demanding,” Smith Metzler tells the Times about the character of Michaela, the downward-spiraling diva who drives much of the comic action. She got to know the woman and “when I saw her life up close and personal, I felt very sympathetic. I had never seen a sadder person in my life, who had more money than God.”
In “Elemeno Pea,” the 33-year-old Juilliard-trained playwright “dramatizes both the seduction and the repulsion as Simone, personal assistant to the exacting, increasingly needy Michaela,” the Times reports. Other characters include Michaela’s middle-class sister, Devon; Simone’s swaggering, idle-rich boyfriend, Ethan; and a dryly impertinent handyman, Jos-B.
In the piece, Smith Metzler also discusses the disastrous launch of her off-Broadway debut, “Close Up Space,” a comedy-drama starring David Hyde Pierce and Rosie Perez, which runs through Jan. 29 at Manhattan Theatre Club.
Read the Los Angeles Times story here.
Heights Playwright Molly Smith Metzler Profiled In Sunday LA Times
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- Bette
