Legacies: A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas, Volume 30, Number 2, Fall 2018 Page: 31
76 p. : some col., ill.View a full description of this periodical.
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In this advance publicity photo, Ross Evans and Dorothy Parker are pictured, with their dog Flic, at their
home at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood.the Story of a Woman. Susan Hayward, in the title
role, received a nomination for Best Actress.2
Much less celebrated were Parker's efforts
as a playwright, but she co-authored five plays.
Four were produced, but none was a hit. The
Coast of Illyria, written in 1948, was her first
attempt at a play in twenty-five years. Co-written
with Ross Evans, her most recent lover, the play
brought her to Dallas in the spring of 1949.
Evans' contribution was more as a researcher
than a writer, but he was young, handsome, and
a heavy drinker-a type favored by Parker. An
ambitious young man (a radio announcer and
former English major), he likely figured out
that being Dorothy Parker's collaborator/escort
was a pretty good career move. Their relation-
ship is reminiscent of the William Holden-
Gloria Swanson partnership in Sunset Boulevard.
Coincidentally, that classic film was in prepa-
ration by writer/director Billy Wilder in 1949.Whether Evans or Parker came up with
the name of the play, the reference was more
literary than geographic. The coast of Illyria
refers to the northwest Balkan peninsula on
the Adriatic coast; more importantly, it refers to
the area where Viola and Sebastian, the sibling
protagonists of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, were
shipwrecked. The counterparts of Viola and
Sebastian were British authors/siblings Charles
and Mary Lamb. They were never shipwrecked,
but their lives were something of a train wreck.
The Lambs and the four other main charac-
ters in the play were Romantic Era writers, most
of whom would be familiar to English majors.
The most recognizable are the Lambs (who
included The Twelfth Night in their widely read
Tales From Shakespeare, sort of a proto-Cliff Notes
for young people). Another character is Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, whose "Kubla Khan" (recited
in part by Coleridge in the play) and "RimeLEGACIES Fall 2018 31
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Dallas Historical Society. Legacies: A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas, Volume 30, Number 2, Fall 2018, periodical, Autumn 2018; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1137646/m1/33/: accessed June 3, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Historical Society.