Play-a-Day

Play-a-Day was Andy Warhol’s proposed collaboration with Truman Capote, built around recording Capote’s ideas and adapting them for performance. Its significance lies less in a documented finished production than in the negotiation the diary preserves: Capote supplied several imagined plots, while Warhol increasingly steered the idea toward recorded material and plays about real people. The surviving episode moves from an exuberant proposal to a practical disagreement, then ends with a scheduled meeting rather than a completed work.

Proposal and working method

Warhol first told Capote that he would tape him and that they could write a Play-a-Day. He imagined Capote acting all the parts himself, including his grandmother. The proposal joined recording, writing, and performance in a compact format: Capote would provide the material, and the tape could retain his own voice and manner as the basis for a play. The title suggests an ambitious recurring form, but the diary does not establish that a daily production schedule was carried out.

Capote responded positively. In a later phone call, he told Warhol he loved the idea and had already done eight. He expected to leave the hospital by Wednesday, where he was undergoing a blood check, and suggested that they have lunch. His quick response gave the plan momentum, but the subsequent account shows that enthusiasm alone did not settle what they would make or how Warhol wanted to work.

Capote’s proposed plays

At lunch with Warhol and Bob MacBride, Capote was on the wagon while Warhol had orange juice and vodka. Warhol taped Capote’s ideas for plays. The first, called The Greek Ideal, concerned a young man, his mother, and a maid on a Greek island. The young man was a Greek scholar planning to attend Harvard and was described as possibly disabled; the imagined story then turned into an absurd, violent fantasy involving rats emerging from the moon. The account preserves the plot’s improbable shift in tone, but Warhol’s reaction was that the ideas were boring.

Capote’s second proposal involved a precocious, paranoid sixteen-year-old in the South who marries a thirteen-year-old girl for her money. Warhol noted that he did not really understand this one. The third, Deep Holes, was presented as something to be improvised, with the possibility of doing anything. Together, the three sketches show Capote offering different kinds of material: a fantastical tale, a compressed story of youthful marriage and money, and an open-ended improvisation. The diary records them as ideas discussed and taped, not as plays completed for an audience.

A change in direction

After hearing the sketches, Warhol tried to redirect the collaboration. Rather than simply taping Capote’s invented stories, he proposed recording Capote himself and making plays about real people. He also asked whether he could go to Capote’s gym. The contrast is central to the project’s early development: Capote brought story premises, while Warhol pressed for a form grounded in observation and in the person being recorded. The diary does not say that Capote accepted this revised approach, so the exchange is best understood as a negotiation rather than an agreed method.

The proposals also expose a difference between the project’s premise and its immediate practice. Warhol imagined that recording could lead directly to playable material, but the lunch conversation produced sketches that he found unsatisfying and a request to move toward real-life subjects. His response did not end the plan. Instead, he and Capote arranged to meet on Friday at eleven, leaving the collaboration open to further discussion.

The diary as the surviving record

The account comes through the weekday telephone diary that Warhol and Pat Hackett established in 1976. Hackett had previously kept a sketchy Factory log focused on visitors, events, and business expenses; the later morning conversations expanded into a record of Warhol’s daily life while continuing to serve its tax-accounting purpose. Hackett took notes during their calls and typed them afterward, so the published account is a mediated record rather than a transcript of a Play-a-Day rehearsal.

That distinction matters when assessing what the project became. The diary documents a proposal, Capote’s claim that he had already written eight pieces, three ideas discussed at lunch, Warhol’s dissatisfaction and counterproposal, and a planned follow-up. It does not establish that any of these sketches were completed, staged, or developed into a continuing series. Hackett also explains that the published diary was distilled from a much longer record, with days, passages, and names omitted to create narrative flow. Within those limits, Play-a-Day remains a revealing example of Warhol testing a collaborative format: first inviting Capote to perform his own imagined material, then trying to turn the recording toward real people.