According to various reports, Cybill Shepherd may be headed to Broadway this spring in a role described by novelist and occasional playwright Gore Vidal as an alcoholic nymphomaniacal billionairess.
All mean-spirited jokes about typecasting aside, last month The New York Post reported that Vidal had completed Masks Outrageous and Austere, the unfinished play Tennessee Williams was working on in 1983 when he choked on the cap of an eye drop bottle and died. Although no theatre has been booked, Peter Bogdanovitch, who directed Shepherd in The Last Picture Show, has been tapped to helm the project.
Williams’ early, minor, and unfinished works have received quite a bit of attention in recent years. Not About Nightingales, a “lost” work from 1938 was nominated for six Tony Awards after its Broadway debut in 1999, and has since been revived all around the country. Also, writer, actress, and former Memphian Jodie Markell finished shooting the previously unproduced Williams screenplay The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond in September 2007.
Vidal, who abandoned playwriting in the 1960s, says that Williams had only completed 10 pages of the script before he died but it was clear where things were headed.