Warhol and Truman Capote's Play-a-Day theater project

Andy Warhol and Truman Capote's Play-a-Day theater project was a proposed collaboration built around recording Capote as he devised and performed short plays, including multiple parts himself. Its significance lies in the diary's account of a creative idea taking shape through lunches, tapes, and performance, while remaining a project in progress rather than a documented finished production. Capote's theatrical imagination appears alongside the practical act of recording him, and the notes leave open how much of the material was intended as scripted work, improvisation, or performance for Warhol and his companions.

Proposal and working method

The plan emerged in conversation about Interview. At lunch with Capote and his boyfriend, Bob MacBride, Warhol proposed recording Capote and developing a Play-a-Day in which Capote would act every part, even his grandmother. The proposal joined a simple production method to Capote's capacity for performance: tape the ideas, then let their author embody the characters. The diary presents this as a playful suggestion, but Capote's response soon gave it a more concrete shape.

At a later lunch at La Petite Marmite, Warhol taped Capote's ideas for plays. Capote said he had already done eight and offered to tell three stories on the spot. Warhol found the ideas boring, an unvarnished reaction that makes the account more than a record of uncomplicated enthusiasm. The project depended on a mismatch that the diary preserves: Capote's abundance of material and willingness to perform it did not guarantee that Warhol would find each idea compelling.

Capote's stories and performance

The most fully recorded example is an idea called The Greek Ideal. Its central figure is a young man, a Greek scholar on his way to Harvard, who may have a disability. Before he leaves, his mother takes him to a Greek island, where the two sit with a maid. In the story's surreal turn, the moon rises and rats emerge from it, overwhelming the young man. The diary preserves the premise and its strange escalation, but the surviving account breaks off while Capote is continuing the story; it does not provide a complete plot or ending.

The idea demonstrates the kind of material the proposed format might have captured: a compact setup, a small group of characters, and a sudden departure into the fantastic. Yet the diary does not say that The Greek Ideal was produced as a play, nor does it describe a performance of it. What it records is Capote narrating an idea into a tape recorder while Warhol listens. The distinction matters: the project is documented through its proposed method and fragments of its creative material, not through evidence of a completed stage or recorded series.

Taping, conversation, and theatrical self-presentation

The recording sessions also moved beyond play premises. Before one lunch, Capote called Warhol to say that he liked the Play-a-Day idea and had already completed eight plays. He expected to leave the hospital after a blood check and proposed meeting for lunch. The diary then records Warhol meeting him at United Nations Plaza at eleven, tape recorder running, as Capote spoke about Babe Paley, recently deceased, and his efforts to find lilies of the valley for her. The project’s recording practice thus took in conversation as well as material explicitly offered as plays.

After lunch, Capote brought Warhol and Bob MacBride to his psychiatrist, having told the doctor in advance that Warhol would be taping. Capote discussed his parents and stepfather, including his father taking his money, while the psychiatrist prompted him to return to a dream. At the end, Capote turned from the emotional scene to characterize it as wonderful acting. The episode makes the boundary between personal disclosure and performance uncertain, but does not settle whether the exchange was staged. In the diary's account, the tape records both what Capote says and his own later framing of the moment as an act.

Recurring meetings and the project's limits

The notes show the idea returning across several meetings rather than resolving in a single burst of inspiration. Warhol and Capote met over lunch with Bob MacBride to discuss Interview; Warhol recorded Capote's play ideas at another lunch; and a subsequent call and appointment kept the Play-a-Day plan in circulation. A later diary entry records Warhol picking up Bob Colacello to meet Capote and Bob MacBride at La Petite Marmite. These repeated arrangements establish sustained contact around Capote and the project, though the entry does not specify what was discussed at that particular meeting.

Warhol later noted having three full-sided tapes from an evening with Capote. This is a concrete record of accumulated audio, but the diary does not identify those tapes as completed Play-a-Day episodes or describe their contents in full. Taken together, the entries document a collaboration at the level of proposal, taped conversation, and developing material: Capote supplied stories and performed himself as their possible interpreter, while Warhol recorded and assessed what he heard. The surviving account leaves the final production outcome unstated.