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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
New York--that "savage's romance," as the poet Marianne Moore described it--occupies such a peculiar, powerful place in the world's imagination that one marvels at those writers who are brave enough to take it on as a subject. But there it is, in stories and plays and essays, from Melville's "Bartleby" to Joan Didion's "Goodbye to All That"--fragmentary works that offer no real conclusions about the romance that most of New York's denizens have with their town. "City of night like you wouldn't believe, absolutely Asphalt Jungle" is how Michael Herr speaks of the island of Manhattan, in his 1977 essay "The Hook." He goes on, "So much culture, such bad manners. . . . Sooner or later it'll bring you to your knees, swear to God."
The energy of Herr's nervous prose is light-years away from the world that the British-born playwright John Van Druten (1901-1957) created in his New York-based plays, among them his 1940 hit, "Old Acquaintance" (now in revival in a Roundabout production at the American Airlines Theatre, under the direction of Michael Wilson). Set alternately in Greenwich Village and on Park Avenue, "Old Acquaintance" is a kind of precursor to the drawing-room shenanigans of such contemporary dramatists as Richard Greenberg and Sara Ruhl. But whereas those playwrights try to fold a Herr-like anxiety and seriousness...
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