The Violet Hour

By Richard Greenburg
Directed by Evan Yionoulis
October 16 - December 21 2003
With Laura Benanti, Mario Cantone, Scott Foley, Jasmine Guy, Robert Sean Leonard

The Violet Hour will have its New York premiere in the fall at Manhattan Theatre Club. Set after World War I, the play centers on fledgling book publisher John Pace Seavering, who is trying to find a way to pick the first manuscript he will publish: either a massive tome by his best friend or the autobiography of his lover. Seavering carefully weighs the effects his decision will have over time while under pressure to make it to the theater on time that evening.

Here's a short piece about the play from New York magazine's Fall Preview:

Time Machine

Take Me Out’s Tony-winning playwright, Richard Greenberg, steps out of the ballpark and takes on history, the nature of ambition—and fate.

It’s that time—“that wonderful New York hour when the evening’s about to reward you for the day . . . the violet light . . . ” So a character in Richard Greenberg’s poignant, funny new play explains the title of his novel and of the play itself: The Violet Hour. Walking through the city at sunset, past hundred-year-old buildings that seem on fire, can induce, Greenberg suggests, a kind of liminal experience: a feeling that the past and future are insinuating themselves into the present.

Greenberg (who won the Best Play Tony last year for Take Me Out) has an obsession with the experience of time, and not just because his rapid rise to national prominence—he’s had six plays produced in the last two years—has turned his own life into something of a blur. “I’ve always tried to make time real to myself,” he says, “and you can do that in a play more than in anything else.”

The Violet Hour, Greenberg points out, is set in 1919, “to give the sense of a cusp,” but anticipates the twenties, evoking what Greenberg describes as “a Fitzgerald-Hemingway-flapper world, with the Harlem Renaissance folded in.” All of these eras have meaning to Greenberg, but Fitzgerald in particular dominated his youth, so much so that Greenberg decided he wanted to go to Princeton when he read The Great Gatsby at the age of 12, and eventually did for just that reason.

The Violet Hour’s hero is an Ivy Leaguer, too. Robert Sean Leonard plays a young publisher who must choose between the unwieldy novel of his college friend and the autobiography of his lover, a Harlem singer played by Jasmine Guy. Early on, a machine in the office starts churning out books that haven’t been written yet, and suddenly the characters know their own fates. It sounds fantastical, but Greenberg is no fan of science fiction, and the conceit isn’t elaborated. “The people in the play just believe it quickly.”

But then they have to cope with the sudden realization that they are living in history—“Look at us, we’re period,” says Leonard’s character at one point. “These aren’t clothes we’re wearing—they’re costumes.” This raises questions, Greenberg says, like “If we could really have a vision of the consequences of all our actions, what would it do to ambition, to the urge to move at all?”

Forty-five-year-old Greenberg himself suffers from no such paralysis. Every time he starts a new play, he tells himself he’ll take a break when it’s finished, but he never does. “For the last two years,” says the time theorist, “I haven’t had an unobligated day.” —A.C.