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<i> Arts and entertainment reports from The Times, national and international news services and the nation's press</i>

Mailer Upset About Broadway Play: Author Norman Mailer is upset about a line in the new one-man Broadway play “Tru” that alludes to a 29-year-old incident in which the writer stabbed his wife. Mailer said in a letter to co-producer Lewis Allen that the reference was “kind of crass,” according to the New York Times. “It’s an ugly line designed to cater to rich out-of-town yahoos,” Mailer wrote. Allen is the husband of “Tru’s” playwright, Jay Presson Allen. The line that irked Mailer is spoken in the first act by Truman Capote, played by Robert Morse, who wants to know “when Norman Mailer stabbed his wife, how much his fee went up.” Mailer wounded his second wife, Adele Morales, with a penknife after an all-night party at his Manhattan apartment in November, 1960. She declined to press charges, but he was indicted by a grand jury and put on probation. In a letter to Mailer, Presson Allen called his protest “a pretty poor show, kid, for someone who for over three decades has assiduously worked at creating the very public image of a provocateur , a tough guy who takes on all comers, a mythic brawler.”

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