Looped

Looped is a play by Matthew Lombardo about an event surrounding actress Tallulah Bankhead. It had a Broadway run in 2010, after two previous productions in 2008 and 2009, all three of them featuring Valerie Harper. Plot Based on a real event, Looped takes place in the summer of 1965, when an inebriated Tallulah Bankhead needed eight hours to redub, or "loop", one line of dialogue for her last movie, Die! Die! My Darling!: "And so Patricia, as I was telling you, that deluded rector has in literal effect closed the church to me." Though Bankhead's outsized personality dominates the play, the sub-story involves her battle of wills with a film editor named Danny Miller, who has been selected to work that particular sound editing session. Productions The first performance of Looped was as a January 8, 2007 New World Stages reading, with Elizabeth Ashley as Tallulah Bankhead and Neal Huff as Danny Miller. In 2008 the play's writer Matthew Lombardo pitched Looped to Valerie Harper - who Lombardo states he envisioned as Tallulah Bankhead when he wrote the play. Harper invited Rob Ruggiero, who in 1998 had directed her off-Broadway in All Under Heaven, to helm Looped, which premiered at the Pasadena Playhouse, Pasadena, California in the summer of 2008. According to Harper, "When the show ran in Pasadena, we got a lot of feedback that the first act was uproariously funny, and the second act was very, very dark. It was almost like two separate plays. Since then...Matthew Lombardo...has added more depth and context to the first act, and more laugh lines to the second act. It’s now a much more cohesive journey."