Announcing THE PARTY LINE
Just in time for the holidays, The New Criterion’s new literary line Criterion Books is publishing their initial offering, THE PARTY LINE, a two-act play by my wife Sheryl Longin and me.
Intermingling real and fictional characters, THE PARTY LINE takes place in Moscow and New York in the Twenties and Thirties and Amsterdam in the early years of this millennium.
Two of the prominent real characters in the play are Walter Duranty — the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent of that earlier era — and Pim Fortuyn — the Dutch politician assassinated in 2002 on the brink of becoming prime minister of that country.
The most important fictional character is Sid Brody, another foreign correspondent in Moscow during that earlier period. His character was based loosely on Eugene Lyons, the former UPI reporter who wrote several books on the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
THE PARTY LINE is just now available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, with ebook versions available shortly. The introduction was written by our own Ron Radosh.
Two reviews have already appeared that I commend to your attention – one here by Bruce Bawer and another at City Journal by Stefan Kanfer. More will hopefully be forthcoming.
Through the published version of THE PARTY LINE we hope to generate enthusiasm for the work that will encourage a major production. We are under no illusions. The cost of the production of a serious play on Broadway or the London’s West End is steep, especially one that takes seven actors (doing multiple roles) as this one does.
But if you read it, I think you will understand why Sheryl and I think it is worth the effort.
The first thing this reminded me of was Billingsley’s June 2000 article on hollywood bias against anything negative about communism.
http://reason.com/archives/2000/06/01/hollywoods-missing-movies
Hopefully we’ll see more works like this in the years ahead.
Look forward to reading it.
i’ve just read this play and found myself truly floored by how funny and entertaining a “period piece” can be. not to mention the travesty-i mean, history-lesson.
– is that there is NO Party Line!
Greetings Roger,
I would love to stage this at our 400 seat Ocala Civic Theatre in Florida if you are looking way off Broadway. I just read your piece about doing rather than whining and was inspired to ask.
Hi Roger,
I’ve been enjoying your play very much, but earlier today I came across an anachronism that violently ejected me from the story. Which made me sad. It was the word “genocide”. You have Sid and Rose arguing whether they are witnessing genocide, but the word wasn’t used until the 1940s. It seems to be widely accepted that Raphael Lemkin invented the term for a 1943 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Unless you’re using the anachronism deliberately and I’ve simply missed your purpose, perhaps you ought to change it to “mass murder”, which apparently goes back to 1880.
Clay
Very good article. It took me two hours to find information on this topic and I’m sorry for the mistakes … I’m writing a language with an interpreter. In Poland there is no such parties. I looked into regularly