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| Jeff Weiss, William Finley. |
Jeff Weiss, a respected “underground” playwright-actor
in the Off-Off Broadway world starred here in his own play under commercial
auspices. The play was received with strong disapproval by the establishment
critics, who saw in it nothing but a virtually nonstop, self-indulgent,
in-joking monologue in which Weiss confessed to the audience, “revealing his
anxieties, frustrations and animosities,” according to Mel Gussow.
Much of F.O.B. (not
to be confused with David Henry Hwang’s 1980 FOB) was directed at Weiss’s Off-Off origins. Set in the future of
1994, it concerned an East Village writer, Warren Penn Woods (Weiss), who is
visited by a dubious encyclopedia salesman (William Finley).