Acclaimed actress Jessica Chastain, winner of 2011 New York, Los Angeles and Chicago Film Critics and National Board of Review Awards and recently nominated for Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards, will make her Broadway debut starring in the Tony Award-winning play The Heiress.
Written by Ruth Goetz & Augustus Goetz, The Heiress will be directed by Tony Award nominated playwright and director Moises Kaufman and will open in the Fall of 2012 at a theatre to be announced.
The Heiress will be produced by Paula Wagner, Roy Furman and Stephanie P. McClelland. This production marks 17 years since the celebrated play was last seen on Broadway. The Heiress is based on the classic Henry James novel Washington Square and became an Academy Award-winning film. The dramatic and suspenseful play features one of the great female roles written for the stage.
The original production of The Heiress, suggested by the Henry James novel Washington Square, premiered on Broadway in 1947 at the Biltmore Theatre. The 1949 Academy Award winning movie version was adapted from the play by the Goetzes, and was directed by William Wyler, starring Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift and Ralph Richardson.
The latest revival of 'The Heiress' has done the near impossible - it's drained the light from one of the most luminous actresses working today. In a good way. Jessica Chastain, that ravishing redhead with the milky skin who shot a dose of bubbly charm to the film 'The Help,' turns almost ghoulish in the title role…What's left is a skittish woman with hollow eyes, a simply horrible hostess who, when she speaks, does so in a dull monotone. Even her hair looks mousy. Full credit goes to Chastain, who has buried herself in dullness to play one of theater's more formidable proto-feminist roles. The men in her life - David Strathairn plays her father and Dan Stevens of 'Downton Abbey' her suitor - aren't too shabby either, each turning in performances that are complex and sympathetic. Neither actor, under the superb, subtle direction of Moises Kaufman, emerges as a straw man.
Maybe, if someone never saw the revelatory Cherry Jones in the 1995 revival of 'The Heiress,' well, maybe the one now starring Jessica Chastain would make the 1947 drama by Ruth and Augustus Goetz feel like a genuine demi-classic discovery.
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