SYNOPSIS | HISTORY | COMMENTS | DOWNLOAD | ADDITIONAL MEDIA

SYNOPSIS: chelsea tells the story of two periods in the life of an artist, inspired by Andy Warhol. The first act looks at the period when the artist is starting to enjoy a quickly growing fame and success, and the second act looks in several years later, when the artist has achieved a great deal of fame and fortune and is in the process of filming an experimental film. (The film the script is inspired by Warhol's calamitous Kitchen, part of which can be seen in the additional media section below.)

HISTORY: Only half of chelsea has ever been produced: The riotous second act, which was produced as a companion piece to the Blue Barn Theatre's production of Cruelties in September of 2003. Both plays shared a director, Rob Urbinati. The cast consisted of longtime Blue Barn actors Jill Anderson and Tim Siragusa, as well as Blue Barn executive director and cofounder Hughston Walkinshaw, who played the Warhol character. Additionally, the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis did a staged reading of the entire play in 2007.

COMMENTS: The play itself was heavily inspired by Andy Warhol's The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, particularly a long chapter in which Warhol describes an indigent and drug addicted young woman he was briefly obsessed with. The play mimics a frequent technique Warhol employed in the book, in the form of dialogues in which the characters are only identified by the letters "a" and "b." It is for this reason that the play shares with The Philosophy of Andy Warhol its subtitle: From a to b and back again.

As with Cruelties, this play is not meant to be understood as a literal biography of Warhol. I simply took elements from the painter's life and hung my own narrative atop them, creating a new work of fiction that borrows heavily from history. While chelsea hews closer to Warhol's life than Cruelties did with Truman Capote, and the second act lifts some of its dialogue from the actual dialogue of the short film Kitchen, none of the events in the play are historic, but for the fact that a film called Kitchen was actually made by Warhol. The play is a pure fabrication, and that must always be remembered when it is produced.

DOWNLOAD chelsea (from a to b and back again) here.

To read the script, you will need a copy of Adobe's free Acrobat Reader program. Download it here.

ADDITIONAL MEDIA

Here is a 60 second clip of Kitchen, the Andy Warhol short film that inspired this play's second act: