Clothes for a Summer Hotel: A Ghost Play Book

The play begins outside the North Carolina asylum where Zelda Fitzgerald is receiving treatment for her mental disorder. She is visited by her husband, Scott, now reduced to hack writing in Hollywood and trying desperately to control his drinking. Their meeting is deeply disturbing for them both, and as Scott realizes that Zelda will never recover, the action shifts to a series of flashbacks which illuminate the causes of their sad plight. We see them in younger, happier, but inescapably destructive days—she in a tempestuous affair with a young French aviator; he matching wits with an acerbic Ernest Hemingway. And, throughout, the drinking, the wild extravagance, and the steady erosion of talent and potential. In the end we are back at the hospital, sure of what must come, but moved by the memory of what once was.