SIMON: Could I ask you to read a section? The heroic costume director, Lakshmi, has had to make a costume out of it - out of a bedspread that she got at Goodwill. PROSE: Yeah, it's a brown chenille bedspread. SIMON: A monkey played by a boy in a monkey suit, which is actually a chenille bedspread, right? She was played Sonya in the in her school production of "Uncle Vanya." And now somehow the mysterious thing has happened, which is decades have gone by, and she's playing Portia McBailey (ph), who is defending a monkey from charges of petty larceny. I mean, she was the star of her Yale Drama School class, and her dreams were of playing Chekhov. PROSE: Well, Margot is really kind of amazed to find herself playing Portia since she had dreams. What does this play mean to - you mean to Margot in her life - at this point in her life? Yale School of Drama grad, just like Meryl Streep, I guess. SIMON: At the center of much of the story is Margot. So then I had to write the novel so I wouldn't have been lying to her. And it turned out to be a completely silent moment in the theater, and everyone heard it. So at some point in the play, my granddaughter said, in what she thought was a very noisy, loud moment in the play - she said, Grandma, are you interested in this? And I think even my granddaughter sensed that something complicated was going on.
And I kept thinking it was kind of tragic because the budget was so low that the actors' costumes were falling apart, and the lighting director couldn't find the actors. And it was supposed to be bright and funny and raucous and delightful. Monkey." And it was a children's musical, and it was way off Broadway.
I took my granddaughter, who's nine at the time, but she was about four or five, to a play that was very much like "Mr. SIMON: A remark from your grandchild inspired this story?
Thanks so much for being with us.įRANCINE PROSE: Thanks for having me on the show. She's the former president of the PEN American Center and a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College and joins us from New York. Monkey" is the new book by Francine Prose, who's the author of 21 novels, including a scad of bestsellers. Francine Prose's his new novel is the backstage story of a threadbare musical made from a shopworn children's book that's performed by a ragged group of actors in a remote-from-Broadway theater that will soon be rubble below condos beneath Manhattan's High Line.
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