Alice at Theatre 40

Staged reading of a play. Written by Kitty Felde. Starring Melanie MacQueen and Daniel Leslie.

Long before the Kardashians, there was Alice. She was the daughter of one of America’s favorite Presidents and married a man who’d become Speaker of the House in an era when tabloid journalism was exploding. She was tall, gorgeous, and every other sentence she uttered was a sound bite that endures to this day. It’s the story of the woman who famously said, “if you don’t have anything nice to say about anyone, come sit by me. She was the daughter of a President, married to the Speaker of the House. Her own daughter was sired by the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Politics, sex, and gossip all in 90 minutes! She was Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

Kitty Felde’s one-woman play (with a ghost) is set on the eve of Tricia Nixon’s wedding. Alice is spinning her version of her life’s story to an unseen reporter – though most of the story is an attempt to gain her father’s attention and approval. The ghost of Theodore Roosevelt is that second character who offers his version of events.