Miss NOBODY from Alabama (2014)
A monodrama based on the play “Zelda” by William Luce
“YOUNG ARTISTS FOR THE YOUNG!”
A production by the First Studio of the Eugene Vakhtangov Theatre.
The premiere took place on March 15, 2014.
The heroine of this story is not a fictional character but a real woman who, in her time, inspired both envy and admiration among her contemporaries. Her name is Zelda—Zelda Sayre, Zelda Fitzgerald. The daughter of a respected judge, the heiress to a substantial fortune, extravagant, unconventional, and contemptuous of bourgeois rules, she was the wife and muse of the famous American writer Francis Scott Fitzgerald, whose worldwide fame was secured by such masterpieces as This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and The Last Tycoon. Gifted with remarkable literary ability, Zelda herself wrote extensively and was published in the popular magazines of the era. Yet her talent was never fully realized.
American playwright William Luce wrote a play about the tragic, terrifying, and at the same time beautiful fate of a woman whose passion and gift, whose self-sacrifice and recklessness—whose very life, finally—became the material for the creation of Fitzgerald’s finest novels. The action of the play unfolds in a clinic where Zelda Fitzgerald is undergoing treatment. The diagnosis is “schizophrenia.” But Zelda is not a typical madwoman. She is simply trying to understand herself, her relationship with the man she loved more than life itself, and to comprehend why the most beautiful and romantic love story ended so tragically.
Together they lived a brilliant, dazzling life, filled with passion and vice. They were called the King and Queen of the 1920s, a decade that entered world history as the “Jazz Age.” And until her final days, Zelda Fitzgerald was grateful to fate for having a brilliant man by her side—one whom she adored and, at the same time, deep in her soul, hated, because her Light was weaker than his Shadow, in which she lived her entire life…
