S.N. Behrman's sophisticated comedy centers on Gaylord Easterbrook, a successful and prolific writer of light Broadway comedies who begins to doubt the value of his own work when a passionate, intellectually ambitious woman named Amanda convinces him that he should be using his talent to write something more serious and socially meaningful. As Gaylord wavers between his gift for effortless comic entertainment and Amanda's flattering but destabilizing insistence that he owes the world weightier drama, his marriage to his supportive wife Linda, an actress who has built her career performing his work, comes under real strain. The play uses its own comic form self-referentially, needling the perennial debate over whether comedy is a lesser art than tragedy, even as it demonstrates through its own wit and construction that comedy can carry real substance. Behrman's polished dialogue and his sympathy for a writer caught between vanity, love, and artistic conscience made the play a Broadway success in its original run. Its meta-theatrical premise, a comedy about whether comedy matters, gave it particular appeal for theater companies with a self-aware sense of humor about their own craft.

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