The upstairs café at the jewelry brand’s flagship New York City store, which cashes in on Capote’s novella and the 1961 film it inspired, only opened in 2017. But the day before Jesse Tyler Ferguson opens Tru, a one-man Off Broadway show about Capote, he’s here—nibbling on scrambled eggs topped with caviar and explaining how he found his take on the writer’s famous speaking voice. “These words sound best in that voice,” Ferguson explains between bites. Looking up across a three-tier platter of pastries, he slips easily into Capote’s reedy, lilting accent. “Croissant,” he says, pressing the word into three buttery syllables.
Ferguson knew he had big shoes to fill—though previous iterations of Capote have one glaring similarity. “There have been some incredible performances of Capote, and they’ve all been done by straight men,” Ferguson says. He’s right: look at Philip Seymour Hoffman, Toby Jones, Tom Hollander, even Robert Morse in the original Broadway production of Tru. But while Ferguson recognizes that Capote’s time was very different from ours, he still feels a special connection to the author. “There’s something really impactful and powerful for me [in being] able to bring my history to this character and bring my experiences of being a kid unsure about his sexuality, and afraid to talk about his sexuality, to this story about someone who absolutely lived that decades before I did,” the Emmy nominee explains.
Tru, an actor’s showcase that Jay Presson Allen constructed partly from Capote’s own words, captures the writer at his nadir. It’s 1975, and ever since the literary triumph of In Cold Blood and the social triumph of his black-and-white ball, Capote has been working on a high-society roman à clef called Answered Prayers. He sees the project as his magnum opus: “My Remembrance of Things Past, my Vanity Fair.” But Esquire has published a chapter of the book—and Capote has suddenly become a pariah among New York socialites like Babe Paley, who dislike the way they’re portrayed in his work. If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because FX recently dramatized the whole saga in the 2024 limited series Feud: Capote vs. the Swans. But onstage, the story is even grimmer. We find Capote alone in his apartment over the Christmas season, battling his demons. “That’s the most depressing set of circumstances one can think of,” Ferguson says.