Jimmy Shine

He is immediately established as mildly freaky: beer chilling on top of an ice cube, a mat of hair pasted on his chest

The play then moves into a flashback structure, which Schisgal handles with consummate skill, moving back and forth from the present to Brooklyn high school days

A quick trip to San Francisco and a painfully funny attempt at going straight working in a fish store, Shine is super-buddies with a school classmate, as boys are prone to be super-buddies in high school

A born follower, he is talked into skipping college by his pal, the idea being to become Village painters Though he has neither an interest in nor a talent for painting, his friend, the ultimate phoney, convinces him that it is possible

So he goes off to paint while the buddy decides to go to college

As it turns out, need I say, the buddy never does become a painter

He goes into his father's real estate business and marries the girl Shine adored

So the artist holes up in his loft, painting terrible pictures and dreaming about the girls he never gets while satisfying himself with a lovely and quite real prostitute

When the play ends, he is still nowhere; still painting though now relieved of taking himself seriously; and so at last capable of doing something

For Schisgal (and for me) the only thing that counts is what you do. Properly, the ending is neither sweet, though it may seem that way, nor sour. It is merely right and the play of course, is the story of an artist" - Martin Gottfried

This famous Broadway success, which starred Dustin Hoffman as a would-be artist who never quite makes it, is touching, funny, and filled with the wry perceptions which have become a hallmark of the author's richly comic style

"Mr. Schisgal is a brilliant writer of comedy, and his play is filled with delightful things" - NY Post