He would engage neighbors in chat about the reality show "Survivor," mystery novels and lawn mower engines.
He has also directed operas, and films including an adaptation of Mary Wesley's novel The Camomile Lawn (1992), but he has not, unlike Eyre, Nunn and former RSC boss Adrian Noble, felt drawn to direct big West End musicals.
Mack Friedman, whose novel Setting the Lawn on Fire won a Publishing Triangle Award, was born in Milwaukee, and his picaresque novel trails from the Midwest to Alaska to the Southwest.
An episode of The Camomile Lawn, a star-studded adaptation of Mary Wesley's novel starring Felicity Kendal, Claire Bloom and Jennifer Ehle, had 7.2 million viewers (31%).
But occasionally the orchestra offers rarities at these summer concerts, and the program it played on Wednesday evening on the Great Lawn of Central Park was split evenly between the novel and the familiar.
ON a blazing afternoon, the Silver Point Beach Club was as indolent as molasses, with some sun worshipers stretched out coma-like on lounge chairs and others, slightly more upright in lawn chairs, dipping drowsily into the latest romance novel.
He knows, as some of us had forgotten, that the last page of that novel contains not just a green breast and a blue lawn but an old island that flowered once "for Dutch sailors' eyes".
Others sit in lawn chairs in front of their shacks, reading novels.
Around 200 free tickets were claimed in advance for the screening, and viewers set up blankets on the lawn to watch the film adaption of Austen's 1811 novel.
