It is 1921. America is changing. Everything is new—jazz, radio, airplanes, Prohibition—It is truly "The Jazz Age."
In New York City, a loose collection of hard-working, hard-drinking, writers, editors, publishers, actors, musicians and hangers-on/wanna-bes, are meeting for lunch daily in the Algonquin Hotel, exchanging insults, puns, bawdy humor, and their quotable quotes, without respect to convention, or to each other.
The Algonquin Round Table, a.k.a. the Vicious Circle, simply put, is a group of people who just happen to enjoy each other's company as they eat together, party together, travel together, sometimes even work together, and who will do so throughout the decade of the 1920s.
Who are these “Algonquin Wits”? Today, the best known personalities of the era are: Dorothy Parker; Robert Benchley; George S. Kaufman; Harold Ross. But even the lesser-known personalities will eventually win Pulitzer Prizes, Academy Awards, O. Henry Awards, and honorary doctorates.
What would it have been like to sit in on an actual luncheon or to be a fly on the wall and listen to the Algonquin Round Table as they spit their venom on each other? What were their opinions on the popular fads of the Roaring Twenties?
A conversation of the Algonquin Round Table has been re-created, focusing on an all-star half-dozen personalities. They arrive for lunch, they talk, and they leave, all in one hour’s time.
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