The great poet W. H. Auden had notable success working on the stage—he collaborated on choral works and an opera with Benjamin Britten and on plays with Christopher Isherwood. But Auden as a character has had a lively theatrical life too. Paul Godfrey’s 1990 play Once in a While the Odd Thing Happens examined Britten’s friendship with Auden in the 1940s. In 2012 the Off-Broadway musical February House featured them living in Brooklyn in the early 1940s, in a house with Gypsy Rose Lee and Carson McCullers. And now comes Alan Bennett’s play The Habit of Art, written in 2009 but making its New York debut as part of Brits Off-Broadway. It shows a declining Auden meeting his old friend Britten after a 30-year estrangement.