Transport Group Announces Talkbacks for Inge Play

Transport Group Artistic Director Jack Cummings III has announced that the company will present three post-show talkbacks for its official 50th anniversary production of William Inge's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. The talkbacks will run as follows:

Thursday, April 5th – Meet the Cast

The cast and company of The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, including Jack Cummings III, Tony Award-winning actress Michele Pawk, and co-stars Donna Lynne Champlin and Patrick Boll, discuss the play.

Thursday, April 12th – Evening with the Experts

A panel discussion with two of the country's leading William Inge scholars, Jeff Johnson (author, William Inge and the Subversion of Gender, Pervert in the Pulpit: Morality in the Works of David Lynch) and Ralph Voss (author, A Life of William Inge).  The panel  will be moderated by Jack Cummings III.
     
Monday, April 16th – Evening with the Artists

Tony and Emmy-winning actress Shirley Knight (Kennedy's Children, TV's "NYPD Blue"), who received an Oscar nomination for her performance as Reenie in the film version of The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, will headline a panel of artists that have worked on Inge plays. Knight's film debut was in the film version of William Inge's Picnic.

Inge, whose works include Come Back, Little Sheba, Bus Stop, and Picnic, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and won the 1961 Original Screenplay Oscar for Splendor in the Grass. The Dark at the Top of the Stairs was his last major play and his most autobiographical, opening on Broadway in 1957 in a long-running, Tony-nominated production directed by Elia Kazan and starring Pat Hingle, Eileen Heckart, and Teresa Wright.  

Transport Group previously presented plays by Inge in 2003. The company's second production was Requiem for William, an evening of seven of his seldom produced plays, which featured a cast of 26 as well as original songs.

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs plays Wednesday through Monday at 8pm, Saturday at 2pm, and Sunday at 3pm through Saturday, April 21, at the Connelly Theatre, 220 East 4th Street, between Avenues A & B (6 to Astor Place, W/N to 8th Street or F/V to Second Avenue).  Tickets are $20 and are available at www.theatremania.com or by calling (212) 352-3101.  For more information about Transport Group and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, visit www.transportgroup.org.

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