Heights Playwright Molly Smith Metzler Profiled In Sunday LA Times

By on January 22, 2012 10:26 am in Celebrity Residents, Theater

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.

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  • Bette

    Also glad to hear about artists residing in the Heights. A relief from hearing about nail salons and dry cleaners. Congratulations to Molly – yes, playwrighting is hard (per the interview) with not a lot of reward other than good reviews (and of course the pleasures of writing). I am a fledgling playwright (in Brooklyn Heights!) myself, and I love to hear these success stories.