From the New York Times bestselling author, critic, and columnist, a memoir about the tangled pursuits of art, ambition, and belonging, set against the backdrop of a tumultuous and tragic era of New York theater
In 1980, Frank Rich joined the New York Times as a drama critic, a dream job thrusting him into the heart of the theater world he had sought as a refuge during his troubled childhood. But what he found upon arriving at Times Square was a far cry from his youthful fantasies. Broadway was growing dark, unable to fill its houses and about to face the devastation of AIDS. It was the end of an era, but as Rich would discover, the beginning of his own second act.
Papering the House is Rich's account of those vibrant but bittersweet years, of the theater he worshipped, and the life he built around it. He recreates opening-night intrigue, the smoke-filled New York newsrooms in the final decade of the print era, and towering personalities, including Stephen Sondheim, Joe Papp and David Merrick, and he recounts the controversies he waded into as a critic alongside the industry’s existential crises. As he navigates young fatherhood, divorce, new love, and great loss, Rich must reexamine why he sought shelter in the theater all those years ago, and in that long overdue reckoning, discovers that the story he must finally understand is his own.
At once an ode to theater, its joys and its disappointments, and an evocative meditation on family—both the one we inherit and the one we try, however imperfectly, to build for ourselves—Papering the House is the moving memoir of the boy who ran away to the theater, and the man who had to find his way back to the world beyond the footlights.
