Douglas Carter Bean...Legendary Playwright Takes on Dorothy Parker at Beechman
Award winning director brings us, “Finding Dorothy Parker” which is starting a limited run of at the Laurie Beechman Theater on Feb. 4.
| 05 Feb 2026 | 03:04
Dorothy Parker (center) was the only woman who was a member of the Algonquin Roundtable with also included (clockwise from upper left Art Samuels, Charlie MacArthur, Harpo Marx, and Alexander Woollcott. She’s the focus of a new play by Douglas Carter Beane. (
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He has won two Drama Desk Awards, and been nominated for five Tonys, for plays like “Country Club” and “Little Dog Laughed.” And now, Douglas Carter Beane is giving us an unusual night of words from a woman he has always admired: the late and great Dorothy Parker. Yes, “Finding Dorothy Parker” officially opens this week for a limited run at the downstairs Laurie Beechman venue on 42nd St. Tickets are selling quickly.
Why this woman for this man at this time?
”I’ve just always loved her, ever since I was a kid,” Carter Beane told me. “And I truly think she influenced my work.” He refers, yes, to Parker’s famously wicked humor, which made her the lone female member of New York’s legendary Algonquin Club. But it was also about how she saw the world.
“As I found new materials,” he adds, “I was beginning to find parallels in her warnings, about what was going on in America in her time and what we see now.”
The next key was finding actresses who could bring those words and warnings to theatrical life. Four rather dazzling comediennes–Jackie Hoffman, Julie Halston, Erica Larsen and Ann Harada–fit the current bill. The quartet rotate reading poems, short stories, and, says Carter Beane, “we even uncovered two songs she wrote for movies.
”Parker’s somewhat surprising political views also rise to the surface here. “She was a true American spirit,” says Carter Beane, “but leery of American jingoism and optimism, prematurely anti-fascist. And how many know that she left her finances and papers to the Martin Luther King estate and the NAACP? What I try to do is give you little crumbs in her political life—for example, believing that segregation was the stupidest part of America. So, we include a 1920s story she wrote about a woman deciding whether she should shake Paul Robeson’s hand.”
Robeson is a black star of Broadway shows including Eugene O’Neills “The Emperor Jones” and the musical “Show Boat.” And he was political activist in the 1920 and 30s, long before civil rights was a mainstream thing.
I asked Carter Beane what or who first inspired him. “I don’t know what it was exactly,” he says, “but I would watch movies and TV early on, and I became very interested in who was writing those works. Heroes were people like pioneers George S. Kaufman and Noel Coward and eventually Mel Books, Woody Allen and Neil Simon. I was a freshman in high school when a librarian asked if I knew of Dorothy Parker.”
Much of his youth was spent at the Genesius Theatre in Reading, Pa. He recently learned the theatre was in some turmoil, so he agreed to become temporary Artistic Director. He has also directed a film, called “Magic Time” with Matthew Broderick and other theatre performers. But for the next few weeks–and perhaps months depending on how the current show does-it is all about the creative woman who most inspired him.
“Young generations have no idea who she was,” he says, “so I am valiantly hoping mothers and grandmothers will bring along their younger relatives.
“His own parting words? “Come on down to Hell’s Kitchen to find Dorothy Parker!”Michele Willens’ Stage Right or Not” airs weekly on Robinhoodradio.