A constitutional amendment prohibiting shows about putting on shows and writers writing about writers should have been passed long ago. But, of the two, the former is, on balance, preferable: the backstage musical is at least potentially mythic—42nd Street’s plucky chorine going out a youngster and coming back a star taps into something more than just song ’n’ dance—and, flattering or not, there is a kernel of truth in the idea of show business as the central thruway of the American dream. But a writer writing about being a writer somehow invariably winds up shrinking the subject to something cramped and fetid and morbidly self-obsessed.

Brian Friel’s Give Me Your Answer, Do!(at the Gramercy) is a generic entry to the field. First seen in Dublin two years ago, the play presents us with two novelists—Garret Fitzmaurice (Gawn Grainger) is a hugely successful sellout prone to self-loathing, Tom Connolly (John Glover) is a critically respected commercial failure prone to self-admiration. A fellow from a Texan university which has already purchased Garret’s archive flies to Ireland to enter into negotiations for Tom’s. The exposition is booted across the footlights in as terse a shorthand as possible: as Tom’s wife (Kate Burton) tells him, “We’re broke, your royalties have dried up, you can’t get on with that new novel, it’s been seven years.” Thanks. Once that’s out the way, we settle down to real-time rumination, punctuated by lots of booze and the odd song. There is a not entirely