A Naked Girl on the Appian Way

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A Naked Girl on the Appian Way is a play by Richard Greenberg. It was commissioned and originally produced by South Coast Repertory in 2004. It later opened on Broadway October 6, 2005.

Artists order their works to share their views of human experience. Book writers like Bess and Jeffrey Lapin, the central characters in Richard Greenberg’s new comedy A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, are no different.

Bess’ cookbooks and other best-selling volumes on food convey her belief in and sense of gracious living. Jeffrey, an admired and successful businessman, wants to marry left brain to right brain in a book that will join business and the arts, and bring about creative and compassionate commerce.

For more than two decades, their family life has been fashioned from that love of order and humanitarian spirit. The Lapins — described as Jewish, but not so as you’d notice — have three (young adult) children, all adopted. Thad, Bill and Juliet resemble a Benetton ad.

As the play opens, Juliet and Thad are returning from their wanderjahr — a year spent traveling through Europe. Bill, the oldest, is a working librarian. Bess and Jeffrey call a gathering at the family homestead to celebrate the travelers return.

The party is crashed before it even gets started by Sadie, the mother-in-law of Elaine, the Lapins’ long-time neighbor. Elaine has somehow inherited Sadie after the death of her husband, Martin, a man no one liked — not even his mother.

And guess what? Both Elaine and Sadie write, or used to write, books.

For all the ordering of experience that has gone on — in and out of books — in those two houses over the years, none of it is able to withstand the forces of nature that confound the Lapins’ ideals of human aspiration and propriety.

In the words of a famous contemporary sometime villain, the heart wants what it wants.

Richard Greenberg speaks in the same luxurious language that have characterized his voice since he began playwriting more than twenty years ago. But A Naked Girl on the Appian Way is one of his most comic, and perhaps his most joyous.