White Horse Theater Company Presents GHOST PLAY

The White Horse Theater Company, known for acclaimed productions of plays by Sam Shepard and Tennessee Williams, will present a rare revival of Tennessee Williams' Clothes for a Summer Hotel. The play is directed by White Horse Producing Artistic Director Cyndy A. Marion, recognized for her recent revivals of Williams' Small Craft Warnings and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel. Performances of this limited 3-week engagement will take place February 5 to 21, 2010 at the Hudson Guild Theatre, located at 441 West 26 Street between 9 and 10 Avenues in NYC. Official opening is February 5.

Shows run Tuesdays-Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays at 3pm with an additional performance on Saturday, February 20 at 2pm. The Wednesday, February 10 performance will start at 7:30pm. Tickets are $18 and can be purchased online at http://www.SmartTix.com or by calling 212-868-4444. $9 student rush tickets go on sale 30 minutes before each show, based on availability. Trains: C, E to 23 St. or 1 to 28 St. For more info visit http://www.WhiteHorseTheater.com

Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Mr. Williams' highly theatrical and evocative "ghost play", imagines an ethereal final meeting between the restless ghosts of literary great F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Set on a windy hilltop at the gates of the Asheville, NC asylum where Zelda was institutionalized before her death by fire in 1948, a desperate Scott pleads for reconciliation while Zelda blames him for her failed writing career and ensuing madness. Taking extraordinary liberties with time and place, "Clothes" fuses the past, present and future as Zelda and Scott re-visit the Jazz Age of their youth on the French Riviera and the ghosts of characters, including Ernest Hemingway, who helped shape their existence.

Williams had a life-long fascination with the Fitzgeralds. The tortures they faced as creative artists in a modern society paralleled his own. He identified directly with Scott's early success and later disfavor and empathized with Zelda's need to create and thwarted ambitions. He also had a special understanding and sympathy for Zelda's madness, having witnessed his own sister's struggles with schizophrenia.

Clothes for a Summer Hotel, which opened at the Court Theatre on March 26, 1980 with Geraldine Page in the role of Zelda, was Mr. Williams' last Broadway production. Other than a production mounted by the York Theater Company in 1995, the play has not been staged in New York City since. Despite the fact that many critics originally failed to appreciate Williams' post-modern dreamscape, several recognized the potential of this "quintessentially American romance" (as described by Our Town's Jeremy Gerard) acknowledging, as The New York Times' Clive Barnes did, that "Clothes" was a play "whose time has not yet come."

Praise for The White Horse Theater Company

"A very good revival of The Late Henry Moss...full of mystery and emotion." ~ The New York Times/Andrea Stevens

"Marion and her cast deliver a deeply compelling staging of a great play." ~ Newsday/Sam Thielman on Buried Child

"Ably directed by Cyndy A. Marion for The White Horse Theater Company, this small but delicately complex composition seems to be a remarkably personal Williams statement." ~ Back Stage Critic's Pick/Karl Levett on In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel

"White Horse Theater Company's well-acted, well-directed production hits the emotional highs and lows." ~ NYTheatre.com Pick Of The Week/In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel

"Director Cyndy A. Marion (who is developing a reputation as an interpreter of Williams' work), wisely keeps the play as a period piece, letting its universal themes of loneliness and unexpected tenderness shine through." ~ BroadwayWorld.com/Duncan Pflaster on Small Craft Warnings

The play's director, Cyndy A. Marion, was named one of NYTheatre.com's 2007 People Of The Year. USA Today has called her "a budding young Shepard interpreter." Ms. Marion's directing credits with White Horse include: Small Craft Warnings, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, The Late Henry Moss, Buried Child, A Lie of The Mind, States of Shock and True West. Other NYC directing credits include the world premieres of Leslie Lee's The Book of Lambert and Mina, both at La MaMa, and PB&J at the 2007 NY Int'l Fringe Festival. She earned her MFA in Directing from Brooklyn College.

The cast includes Tom Cleary, Peter J. Crosby, Mary Goggin, Chris Johnson, Julie Kelderman, Sarah Levine, Ambien Mitchell, Kyle Lamar Mitchell, Lisa Riegel, Montgomery Sutton, Rod Sweitzer and Kristen Vaughan.

The design and production team consists of Obie-Winner John C. Scheffler (Set Design), Randall Parsons (Additional Set Design/Execution), Debra Leigh Siegel (Lighting Design), Adam Coffia (Costume Design), David Schulder (Sound Design), Joe Gianono (Incidental Music), Mike Chin, (Fight Choreography), Liz Vacco (Dance Choreography) Vittoria Natale and Guillermo Elkouss (Tango Choreography) and Elliot Lanes (Stage Manager).

There will be a post-show moderated discussion following the February 14 performance with renowned Tennessee Williams scholar Dr. Annette J. Saddik and Nancy Milford, author of Zelda. Saddik is an Associate Professor in the English Department at New York City College of Technology (CUNY), a teacher in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of Contemporary American Drama and The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams' Later Plays. Milford's Zelda was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and spent twenty-nine weeks on The New York Times best-seller list.

The White Horse Theater Company is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing and developing American plays and playwrights. They seek to investigate, define and celebrate American identity and culture by re-examining American classics and nurturing new American voices. This production has been made possible in part through the sponsorship of The Field, and with funding provided by White Horse Theater Company Sponsors.

 

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