A RESTLESS NIGHT WITH F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
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Set in a seedy hotel in Hendersonville, North Carolina, where Fitzgerald had retreated after a rest cure in Asheville turned into a summer-long drunk, Tom Webb’s one-man show A Restless Night With F. Scott Fitzgerald catches the writer at one of the lowest points in his career–August 1935. The end of the summer when alcoholism, tuberculosis, neurosis, and a series of personal crises, not the least of which was Zelda’s descent into madness, brought on a complete physical and mental breakdown.
It was during this “dark night of the soul,” Fitzgerald later wrote in a series of personal essays, that he realized he’d been “drawing on resources [he] did not possess,” “mortgaging [himself] physically and spiritually to the hilt,” and he “cracked like an old plate.” Webb uses these essays–“The Crack-Up,” “Sleeping and Waking,” and “Early Success”–which first appeared in Esquire and later in book form, as the main sources for his show. The portrait that emerges is not easy to watch.
