"Lost" Noël Coward play premieres in New York

BBC News reports that Long Island Sound, a never-produced play written by Noel Coward in the 1940s, had its world premiere in New York City this week. The play began life as a short story based on a nightmarish party Coward attended in the United States in 1937--10 years later he completed the script but decided against producing it as it was critical of real-life New York socialites of the era. (Decades later Truman Capote would lose his social standing after the publication of excerpts from his own similarly acerbic novel, Answered Prayers.) Coward biographer Barry Day unearthed the play in 1999 in a vault in Switzerland and gave it to the Actors' Company Theatre in New York, which is currently producing it. Meanwhile, the Tony-nominated revival of Coward's Private Lives continues playing to sold-out houses on Broadway.