Silent-film performer Louise Brookes was living in obscurity when bad-boy theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, who was infatuated with her film persona Lulu, tracked her down for a New Yorker profile. In a script crackling with wit, Janet Munsil recreates their encounter.
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"Influential theatre critic Kenneth Tynan’s fascination with silent-film performer Louise Brooks led him to track her down to her Rochester apartment in the 70s. The developing relationship between the enigmatic, Garbo-like Brooks and Tynan, living a rich fantasy life with the film-inspired Lulu, fires up Emphysema, the hit of this year’s playRites." —NOW "Emphysema (A Love Story) is a play infatuated with the movies, yet it is filled with those intensely experienced moments possible only in theatre. It is a play about celebrity, obsession, style, and above all else, smoking which means, of course, that it’s a play about sex and death. Its writer is Janet Munsil, producer of the Victoria Fringe Festival, author of several children’s books and now brilliantly a playwright. Munsil was inspired to write her piece by a 1979 article in The New Yorker, a profile of Louise Brooks, the screenwriter, one-time silent-movie star and former girl-about-town, by the great British drama critic Kenneth Tynan. She was living in obscurity; he was still famous as a journalist, as the author of the racy musical O Calcutta, and as the man who said the F-word on television. In 1979, both were dying of emphysema, brought on by smoking and hastened by alcoholism. Tynan, as Munsil pictures him, has a sexual obsession with Lulu, the man-eating flapper whom Brooks played in her most famous movie, the 1928 silent German film, Pandora’s Box. Lulu is always stylish, ever sophisticated, completely Manhattan, utterly European. She is everything that Tynan—a man who calls everyone darling, a man who is both famous and a celebrity hound—wants and wants to be. And then he meets the real thing, a grumpy old bat dismissive of her former fame and celluloid incarnation."—Kate Taylor,The Globe & Mail
About the Author
Janet Munsil lives in Victoria, BC. Emphysema was first produced at Alberta Theatre Projects Pancanadian play rites ’97 Festival, and by The Tarragon Theatre in 1998.
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