SETTING

ACT ONE:

December 23, 1975 Truman Capote’s apartment in the United Nations Plaza

ACT TWO:

Christmas Eve, Capote’s apartment

BACKGROUND:

     Tru takes place in the days before Christmas of 1975. Esquire has just 

published the first chapter from Answered Prayers that Truman Capote 

has begun writing about his wealthy friends among New York’s elite, 

intending to create a masterpiece commenting upon the “sexual license 

and ethical squalor” of the privileged.  Much to his surprise, his friends 

are deeply hurt by the harsh commentary by someone they considered a 

close friend and most of them abandon him.  
     Alone in his Apartment overlooking the UN, Truman chats with 

luminaries like Eva Gardner, tells ribald stories about himself and drinks 

himself into a serious hangover as he contemplates his life and what has 

brought him to this moment.  

     The show is funny, sad and touching and helps explain a man who 

was one of the twentieth century’s greatest American writers of such 

classics as In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

     It also raises questions about what drove him to write such a scathing 

attack on his friends and have no sense of why they would react as they 

did, while giving insight into what about these pivotal events stopped 

him from ever writing again, dying nine years later from alcoholism.