Moss Hart's backstage comedy captures the frantic, superstition-riddled final hours before the Boston tryout opening of a new Broadway play, as producer Sidney Black, temperamental leading lady Irene Livingston, and pretentious director Carleton Fitzgerald all convene in a hotel suite convinced their show is a certain flop and searching for someone else to blame. As bad reviews, backers threatening to pull their money, and the cast's own panicked recriminations pile up through the night, the assembled theater folk swing wildly between despair and grandiose denial, each one certain that their own contribution was the only thing holding the production together. Hart, drawing on his own extensive experience with out-of-town tryouts, packs the comedy with affectionately merciless portraits of theatrical egos, superstition, and the peculiar psychology of people whose livelihoods depend on the whims of critics and audiences. The eventual, unexpectedly triumphant reviews arrive almost as an afterthought, the real comic pleasure lying in watching thoroughly self-absorbed professionals convince themselves of their own doom and glory in the space of a single anxious night. Its knowing, insider's-eye view of the theater business made it a particular favorite among theater companies staging a show about their own beloved, chaotic industry.

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