Oona, Abba,’ I say.”įinally, actress Uta Hagen joins the party, and the round-robin introductions become a blizzard of dadaist nonsense: “Uta, Yma Uta, Ava Uta, Oona Uta, Ona Uta, Ida Uta, Ugo Uta, Abba Uta, Ilya Uta, Ira Uta, Aga Uta, Eva.”ĭirector Martin Charnin asked Meehan to adapt Yma Dream for an Emmy Award-winning 1970 television special featuring actress Anne Bancroft. In a feat of dazzling wordplay, Meehan portrayed a beleaguered host opening his door to a series of guests, all with disyllabic first names, including Ava Gardner, Abba Eban, Ida Lupino, Ilya Ehrenburg and on and on: “The bell rings again, and I am pleased to find Oona O’Neill, Charlie Chaplin’s wife, at the door. He worked for a decade at the New Yorker, where he wrote one of the magazine’s classic humor pieces, “Yma Dream,” about an imaginary cocktail party for the Peruvian singer Yma Sumac. Meehan once aspired to be a serious novelist, but he turned toward journalism and humor because “whenever I wrote Faulkner-esque, it came out lousy-esque.”
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Carolyn Meehan. Thomas Meehan, a onetime magazine writer who became a three-time Tony winner on Broadway, writing the plot and dialogue for the blockbuster hit musicals Annie, The Producers and Hairspray, died Tuesday at his home in New York City.
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