Director's Note

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As the play opens, Mr. Sheridan Whiteside - a world-renown journalist, lecturer, and radio broadcaster - has been laid up with a fractured hip while a guest in a small-town Ohio home (the Stanleys'). Still threatening lawsuits over the injury he received by slipping on the front porch, Whiteside antagonizes the household with his many demands, and commandeers the library, kitchen, and living and dining rooms for his own private use.

Soon Whiteside's gang of glitterati descend upon the house, bringing all kinds of eccentric gifts along with their Hollywood personalities. Whiteside, meanwhile, is pestered by a local doctor (turned author) and a local newspaperman (Bert Jefferson) who has written a play. When Whiteside learns that his treasured secretary (Maggie Cutler) has fallen in love with the newspaperman, he hatches a devious scheme to break up the budding romance, involving a Hollywood stereotype femme fatale (Lorraine Sheldon).

The Man Who Came to Dinner is both a satire of and a love-letter to the literary and pop-culture celebrities of its day. Whiteside is modeled on Alexander Woollcott, a friend of the author's and one-time drama critic at the New York Times, who parlayed his success as a reviewer into a career as a lecturer, writer, and broadcaster. The play's first audiences would have recognized many other allusions to celebrities in the play, including thinly-disguised portrayals of Noel Coward (Beverly Carlton) and Harpo Marx (Banjo).