Bridges Stage Company to Present Edmund White's TERRE HAUTE, 5/15-6/15

Bridges Stage Company in collaboration with ACT Central Heating Lab presents the Pacific Northwest Premiere of Edmund White's Terre Haute, directed and produced by Aaron Levin. Terre Haute previews May 15th, opens May 16th to June 15th, 2014 at ACT's Eulalie Scanduzzi Space (the "Lalie").

A famous expatriate author travels from Paris to Terre Haute, Indiana to interview America's most notorious terrorist on death row. As the clock counts down, a bond grows between these two strangers in Edmund White's raw and emotional look at the collision of humanity and politics.

In November of 1998, Vanity Fair published Gore Vidal's explosive article "The War at Home," in which he put the erosion of our country's Bill of Rights under the microscope. The article caught the attention of Oklahoma City Bomber, Timothy McVeigh and a three-year correspondence began. McVeigh was executed in 2001 and the two never met in person. Vidal later shared the correspondence with author, essayist, and playwright, Edmund White inspiring the latter to turn the Vidal/McVeigh letters into the freely imagined fictional meeting, Terre Haute.

"In Terre Haute, Edmund White looks at the terrorist as a human being, not the monster that our media and government would prefer we see," says director,Aaron Levin. "He is a human being who was turned into a killing-machine by our government for their war purposes. But when this decorated war hero - a trained killer - comes back home, he's expected to slip back into the normalcy of everyday life without any help."

Directed and produced by Bridges Stage Company artistic director, Aaron Levin Terre Haute features Robert Bergin as Harrison and Norman Newkirk as James with the design talents of Rick Araluce (Set), AJ Epstein (Lighting), Doris Black (Costumes), Kyle Thompson (Sound), with stage management byBrianna Larson. Terre Haute is associate-produced by Lois Greenberg.

Born in 1940 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Edmund White's best-known work, A Boy's Own Story (1982), is the first volume of a fictional trilogy that continued with The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997). The series describes the stages in the life of a gay man from boyhood to middle age. Several characters in these latter two novels are based on well-known individuals from White's New York literary and artistic circles. Other well-known works, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977), Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978), and The Married Man (2000) are also gay-themed and draw heavily on White's own life. His autobiographical works are often quite frank and unapologetic about his promiscuity and his HIV-positive status.