A Parley in Brooklyn

Abstract

In this short play, Peter Lennon imagines a speculative encounter between Thomas Hardy and Norman Mailer, staging a dialogue across literary periods to explore questions of authorship, masculinity, artistic responsibility, and historical change. Bringing together Hardy’s late-Victorian moral gravity and Mailer’s twentieth-century performative bravado, the play dramatizes contrasts in temperament, style, and cultural circumstance while allowing each figure to interrogate the other’s assumptions about power, gender, fame, and literary legacy. Through sharp, often ironic exchange, the piece foregrounds the continuity of literary ambition and anxiety across time, suggesting that debates about authority, transgression, and artistic courage are not bound to a single era. The play functions both as homage and critique, using dramatic form to illuminate Mailer’s place within a longer tradition of contentious literary masculinity.