Tennessee Shakespeare Company Announces First Southern Literary Salon of the Season

Tennessee Shakespeare Company (TSC), the Mid-South's professional classical theatre, returns to its popular Southern Literary Salon for a look at the ever-changing vision of the Pulitzer Prize-winning, life-long daughter of Jackson, Mississippi.

TSC presents Eudora Welty: Mississippi Myth at Nancy Copp's hidden, welcoming Germantown home on Friday, January 27 from 6:00-8:00pm.

The evening features fun Southern food, conversation, thirty minutes or so of readings from Welty's works, and a mixed spirit of the author's liking. Tickets for the Welty Salon only are $55 and include all of the above. Tickets for the Welty and Flannery O'Connor Salon (April 21), when purchased together, are only $100 (a savings of $10).

Curated and read by TSC artist Stephanie Shine, assisted by actors Dan McCleary, Jillian Barron, and Marquis Archuleta, Mississippi Myth will employ text from Welty's works, likely including her short stories in A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, and The Golden Apples, and the novels The Ponder Heart and award-winning The Optimist's Daughter.

Welty (1909-2011) described writing fiction as "a personal act of vision." She was widely popular as a writer and photographer from her lifelong home in Jackson, though her literary home seemed to be nestled in experimentation. Her vast skill-set ranged from comedy to tragedy, realistic to surreal, fiction to biography, fairy tale to history. Welty was recognized for her work with 40 major literary awards, 38 honorary doctorate degrees, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

"It had been startling and disappointing to me," wrote Welty, "to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ..."

Box Office Information

General Admission tickets are on sale now, Monday - Friday, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm at TSC's office located within The Shops at Forest Hill at 3092 Village Shops Drive, Germantown, TN 38138 (near Target); by calling 901-759-0604, or by going on-line to www.tnshakespeare.org (Twitter: @tnshakespeare).

Salon performances are general admission. Free parking. No refunds or exchanges. Credit card charges require a $1 per-ticket fee. Programs and schedules are subject to change with notice. The address for Mrs. Copp's house will be given out only to patrons once tickets have been sold.