Someone Wrote a Play About Jonathan Safran Foer!
From lovable Brooklynite novelist Jonathan "Safran" Foer (the hip one!) to New Republic editor Franklin Foer (he's the serious one!) to stunt-rememberer and baby brother Joshua Foer (he will come up with some way to bother us later!), everyone loves the Foer Brothers. Everyone except, apparently, playwright Itamar Moses, who has written a play about how much he hates his successful old band camp buddy Jonathan Safran Foer. Vanity Fair noticed that the two main characters in Moses's The Four of Us are quite a bit like Moses and Foer, as one is a mostly unknown playwright and the other is a ridiculously successful young novelist. There is some jealousy. Then Moses makes fun of Liev Schreiber!
Sure enough, Scene Two takes place inside the apartment of the actor who has optioned Benjamin's book. The scene opens with David remarking, "I've never been in an apartment where the owner has so many pictures of his own face on the walls."
Amusingly, VF's Michael Hogan tried to reach Schreiber and Foer for comment on this bitchy play that makes fun of them, but they were unavailable, as they were having a money fight.
The play ends, appropriately, with playwright "David" and novelist "Benjamin" leaving the play itself.
"How could you write about me?," Benjamin demands.
David's response says it all: "How could you not write about me?"
Answer: Mr. Moses, you do you appear to speak in a whimsical pidgin English. We assume you're Jewish, though, so you're halfway there.
There is a good lesson here for aspiring playwrights, though. Bratty autobiographical playwriting is only fun when it mocks someone we can all hate on.
Literary Feud Watch: Jonathan Safran Foer vs. Itamar Moses [VF]