WARHOLCAPOTE: A Non-Fiction Invention

by Rob Roth, Dennis Boutsikaris (Read by), Dan Butler (Read by), Stephen Spinella (Read by), Blake Gopnik (Preface by)

Overview

An enthralling play based on lost tapes between two cultural giants and friends—Andy Warhol and Truman Capote.

In 1978 Andy Warhol and Truman Capote decided to write a Broadway play. Andy suggested that he record their private conversations over the period of a few months, and that these tapes would be the source material for the play. The tapes were then filed away and forgotten. Their play was never completed.

Now, award-winning director Rob Roth brings their vision to life after a years’ long search to unearth the eighty hours of tapes of between two of the most daring artists of postwar America. WARHOLCAPOTE, based on words actually spoken by the two men, is set in the ’70s and ’80s, toward the end of their close connection and not too long before their untimely deaths. Their special, complex friendship is captured by Roth with bracing intimacy as they discuss life, love, and art and everything in between. Every word in the play comes directly from these two 20th century geniuses. The structure of the conversations springs from Roth’s imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781797142432
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication date:	09/20/2022
Product dimensions:	5.59(w) x 5.75(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Rob Roth directed the world premiere of Elaborate Lives: The Legend of Aida, collaborating with Sir Elton John and Sir Tim Rice. His other director credits include the Broadway musical Lestat, based on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles with a score by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Roth received a Tony nomination for his Broadway directing debut, Disney’s Beauty and The Beast, which went on to become the eighth-longest-running show in Broadway history. Beauty has been seen by more than 40 million people all over the world. Rob’s first play as an author, WARHOLCAPOTE, debuted at American Repertory Theatre.

Dennis Boutsikaris, winner of AudioFile Magazine’s 2010 Best Voice in Mystery & Suspense, has recorded more than 100 audiobooks for publishers in the United States and Great Britain.  His critically-acclaimed work has garnered four Golden Earphone awards and two Best Voices of the Year Awards from AudioFile Magazine and five Audies from the Audio Publishers of America.  His performances include reading novels by Richard North Patterson, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, and Joseph Finder.

Boutsikaris has appeared in numerous Broadway, television, and film roles. He played Mozart on Broadway in Amadeus, and has appeared on television shows including Shameless, The Good Wife, House M.D., Grey’s Anatomy, ER and Law & Order.  He has won two Obie Awards—one for Outstanding Performance in Nest of the Wood Grouse and one for Outstanding Performance in Sight Unseen. His films include The Bourne Legacy, W., The Education of Charlie Banks, *batteries not included, Dream Team, Boys on the Side, and Crocodile Dundee 2.

Dan Butler, audiobook narrator, actor, writer, director, and producer, has had major roles on and off Broadway and has appeared in numerous television shows, including Frasier, House, and Monk. He cowrote and directed Karl Rove, I Love You and has appeared in such feature films as Crazy, Stupid, Love; Silence of the Lambs; Enemy of the State; and Fixing Frank, among others.

Two-time Tony^® Award winner Stephen spinella has starred in such Broadway productions as Our Town, Angels in America, and Love! Valour! Compassion! Regionally and Off-Broadway, he has appeared in works by Shaw, Beckett, Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov.

Blake Gopnik, one of North America’s leading arts writers, has served as art and design critic at Newsweek, and as chief art critic at the Washington Post and Canada’s Globe and Mail. In 2017, he was a Cullman Center Fellow in residence at the New York Public Library, and in 2015 he held a fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at City University of New York. He has a PhD in art history from Oxford University and is a regular contributor to the New York Times.

Editorial Reviews

04/18/2022

In 1978, Andy Warhol and Truman Capote set out to write a Broadway play by recording their conversations—it never happened, but Broadway director Roth (The Art of Classic Rock) here uses the recordings to fashion an inventive if uneven stage play that inevitably favors dialogue over plot. There are a number of exciting exchanges: “Friendship is the perfect sort of trust and belief,” Capote says, and “If someone would really take care of Truman, he would be okay,” Warhol muses. Many names are dropped: Liza Minnelli is “wild!”; Tennessee Williams is spotted in a Key West bar; and Jackie Kennedy is “the world’s greatest female impersonator.” Following the play comes some “bonus” transcript material consisting of the artists’ thoughts on writing, sex, speaking engagements (“I do think one should do it once in a while,” Capote says), and New York City (“It changes so quickly. It just changes like that,” according to Warhol). Unfortunately, the back-and-forth often comes across as dry and navel-gazing on the page, lacking the dynamism of a live dialogue. Still, Capote and Warhol fanatics will relish “hearing” directly from the artists in this unique if not wholly successful endeavor. (May)

Publishers Weekly

PRAISE FOR WARHOLCAPOTE THE BOOK

"Capote and Warhol fanatics will relish ‘hearing’ directly from the artists." —Publishers Weekly

"A poignant drama about two influential yet fragile figures grappling with the 'very excruciating life' of an artist."—Kirkus Reviews

PRAISE FOR THE PRODUCTION OF WARHOLCAPOTE

"A sobering perspective on the toxic highs of celebrity."—New York Times

"Astonishing...the play shines an incisive light on these two important American artists."—Broadway World

"Delicious, gossipy and insightful. Fascinating and illuminating."—White Rhino Report

"A taut meditation on art. A profound tenderness reverberates long after play's end."—Theatre Mania

"The show certainly deserves to be famous far longer than Warhol's proclaimed 15 minutes."—Variety

From the Publisher

Stephen Spinella and Dan Butler reprise their 2017 Broadway roles as Andy Warhol and Truman Capote in this funny, touching, and deceptively straightforward dialogue between the famous pair. It is based solely on their private conversations recorded on 59 audio cassettes in the late 1970s to early ‘80s. With a preface read by art critic Blake Gopnik and the fascinating history of the project filled in by author/editor Rob Roth, the two cultural icons gossip about life, love, celebrities, and family. With the stellar performances of Spinella and Butler, backed by Dennis Boutsikaris reading stage directions, we hear an intimate, endearing portrait of two of the most public, most outwardly gay, most outrageous artists of twentieth-century America chatting like the best of friends. B.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile

Stephen Spinella and Dan Butler reprise their 2017 Broadway roles as Andy Warhol and Truman Capote in this funny, touching, and deceptively straightforward dialogue between the famous pair. It is based solely on their private conversations recorded on 59 audio cassettes in the late 1970s to early ‘80s. With a preface read by art critic Blake Gopnik and the fascinating history of the project filled in by author/editor Rob Roth, the two cultural icons gossip about life, love, celebrities, and family. With the stellar performances of Spinella and Butler, backed by Dennis Boutsikaris reading stage directions, we hear an intimate, endearing portrait of two of the most public, most outwardly gay, most outrageous artists of twentieth-century America chatting like the best of friends. B.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile

2022-02-15
Actual conversations between two iconic gay artists form the basis for a new play.

In 1978, longtime friends Andy Warhol and Truman Capote made cassettes of their conversations, “approximately eighty hours of recordings.” Roth, director of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast on Broadway, learned that Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum owned these tapes but that they were inaccessible to the public. With the help of museum board members such as artist Cindy Sherman and filmmaker John Waters, he gained access. Most of the conversations were dull, but then he got to “the magic tape” in which Warhol suggested they “take their words and make a play out of them.” That play never happened, but Roth has fashioned his own “non-fiction invention” from the conversations of “two of my idols.” The first half of the book consists of the text of the play, short scenes in which Warhol and Capote gossip about everything from the vagaries of fame to Capote’s rehab stint for alcoholism. The second half is a “Bonus” section of exchanges in which they dish about boyfriends, sex clubs, and a famous woman who was “one of Hitler’s greatest friends.” Roth redacted many names from the bonus exchanges, leaving place holders for “a very famous rock star” and “a trend-setting woman of high social standing,” among others. These excisions might leave readers who are thirsty for gossip feeling parched. The play, however, is an imaginative portrait, with Capote coming across as the needier of the two, wondering if he’s wasted his years while maintaining he was “the one and only real true genius in America.” Meanwhile, Warhol was his concerned caregiver, eager to protect the man he was so obsessed with in his youth that Capote’s mother had to tell him to stop pestering her son.

A poignant drama about two influential yet fragile figures grappling with the “very excruciating life” of an artist.

Kirkus Reviews