The Great Collaborator George S. Kaufman, also known as “The Great Collaborator”, has written 45 plays with 16 different known collaborators, hence his nickname. Kaufman’s success stems from his many collaborations of course but also the metatheatrical techniques used in his work. Using this technique Kaufman was able to populate his plays and musicals with characters based both firmly and loosely on the celebrities at the time. Throughout many of Kaufman’s works this technique is encountered by the audience/reader extensively despite his already skillful satirical talent. George Simon Kaufman was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on the 16th of November in 1889 into a middle-class Jewish family and had a desire to immerse himself in literature,
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The Man Who Came To Dinner was written in 1939 and primered in the Music Box Theater, New York City the same year. The idea and context of this play originated when Alexander Woollcott met with Moss Hart to discuss his hopes to play a role in one of his plays. Hart collaborated with well-known playwright George Kaufman to create the classic it’s known to be today. Woollcott simply wished to play a parody role for his already public knowledge of Woollcott, yet when to be examined in the play as the character Whiteside, Woollcott was decidingly resembled by Kaufman and Hart, the most notable playwrights at the time, to be how they knew Woollcott personally, meaning they chose to resemble Whiteside based on the friendship they shared with the great personality. Yet they chose certain aspects of Woollcott’s profile to not be included in the character such as his alcoholism and sexual preferences leaving a suitable outline to be rummaged with Kaufman and Hart’s talent and intelligence of making fascinating and relatable characters for the reader and audience. When explaining the choice of using the public image of Woollcott, Hart stated, “We decided to use only public aspects of his character. That is, to be guided in the plot by his lecture tours, his broadcasts, his charm, his assiduousness, his interest in murders, and all of this had to be worked into the plot of the play. Those things were the core of the play, and the plot was something that had to be worked around
The Man Who Came To Dinner was written in 1939 and primered in the Music Box Theater, New York City the same year. The idea and context of this play originated when Alexander Woollcott met with Moss Hart to discuss his hopes to play a role in one of his plays. Hart collaborated with well-known playwright George Kaufman to create the classic it’s known to be today. Woollcott simply wished to play a parody role for his already public knowledge of Woollcott, yet when to be examined in the play as the character Whiteside, Woollcott was decidingly resembled by Kaufman and Hart, the most notable playwrights at the time, to be how they knew Woollcott personally, meaning they chose to resemble Whiteside based on the friendship they shared with the great personality. Yet they chose certain aspects of Woollcott’s profile to not be included in the character such as his alcoholism and sexual preferences leaving a suitable outline to be rummaged with Kaufman and Hart’s talent and intelligence of making fascinating and relatable characters for the reader and audience. When explaining the choice of using the public image of Woollcott, Hart stated, “We decided to use only public aspects of his character. That is, to be guided in the plot by his lecture tours, his broadcasts, his charm, his assiduousness, his interest in murders, and all of this had to be worked into the plot of the play. Those things were the core of the play, and the plot was something that had to be worked around