What must have been a riveting evening at the theater was turned into an equally riveting hour and a half of television for the Public Broadcasting System's American Playhouse series. Tru preserves Robert Morse's one-man show, written by Jay Presson Allen, as Truman Capote.
Tru takes place on the evenings of December 23 and 24, 1975, after Esquire had published an installment - La Cote Basque, 1966 - of Capote's much-talked-about but never-finished novel Answered Prayers. Capote, one of the late century's most astute social climbers, had just about ceased writing the better to rub elbows with the filthy rich. But he then committed the unforgivable faux pas of publishing a less than adulatory chronicle of their shenanigans. They closed ranks to drop him like a hot brick, and Capote is still reeling from the cold shoulders turned his way, particularly those of his two favorite ladies-who-lunch, Mrs. William ('Babe') Paley and Lady Nancy ('Slim') Keith.
Alone in his lavish apartment in the United Nations Plaza, Capote chatters on the telephone, makes plans for a night on the town with 'Ava Gardner and her crowd,' and drinks, all the while sustaining a monologue drawn from his writings, his interviews, and the treasure trove of anecdotes about him. His ramblings range from his present plight back to his mythologized childhood, touching on his work, his homosexuality, his alcoholism, his fame and his finances. Grandiosity and mendacity flow with the vodka (and the marijuana) but can't disguise the loneliness and despair that he could never vanquish.
Allen (whose screen writing credits include Marnie, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Cabaret) constructs the evening(s) ingeniously. If there's a fault in her play, it's that she too often opts for the easy path down those sub-Proustian memories of growing up in the storybook South (Capote himself had a profitable cottage-industry going to milk his conflicted boyhood; there's no need to recap all that again).
But even in the maudlin and mawkish passages Morse never missteps, contributing an utterly superb turn as a figure whose own self-promotion made him a household figure. Wisely, Morse does not attempt to mimic Capote's voice, that insinuating caw of a bird of prey (the actual voice, or a very precise imitation of it, turns up on his answering machine).
Morse juggles Capote's contradictions with virtuosic aplomb, leaving us with a poignant portrait of a riven man, with a touch of genius to him, unable to cope with the self-destruction he knows he's bound for. But he also memorializes the fey and funny Capote, wit, gadfly and raconteur, the odd little gnome with the piping voice that, in Norman Mailer's words, 'set New York on its ear.'
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