Still No Word From Mary

 

In Jesse Green's painstakingly balanced 2009 profile of much-revered/much-reviled playwright Arthur Laurents, who died last week, Green couldn't get composer/lyricist Mary Rodgers Guettel to speak to him--or rather, the only quote he could pry from her on the record was a terse and telling, "Call me back when he's dead." As Jason Zinoman's new oral history of Laurents is any indication, Mary Rodgers Guettel is still keeping her counsel on the subject. But the best quote has to be Patti LuPone's final thought: "Arthur was a lot of human being."