The Big Picture and the Closeup

‘Every good story’s a war story,’ says a character in Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah, premiering at the Contemporary American Theater Festival. That certainly seems to be playwright Mark St. Germain’s approach in imagining a 1937 encounter between writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

The accepted metaphor for this coordination of the various branches of the law is “the seamless web.” But the tight four-part harmony of the Manhattan Transfer would have been closer to the mark.