Transatlantic Liaison Runs Off-Bway This Spring

By: Jan. 13, 2006
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Transatlantic Liaison, Fabrice Rozié's new play about French existentialist writer Simone de Beauvoir and her passionate, volatile love affair with American novelist Nelson Algren, will be given its Off-Broadway premiere, with previews beginning February 20 prior to an official opening on March 1, at Theater Row's Harold Clurman Theater (410 West 42nd Street).  It will run through April 2nd.
 
Directed by John McLean (who has helmed many productions in France) the show will feature Elizabeth Rothan (winner of the Dallas-Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum Award, Cymbeline, Top Girls in New York) as Simone de Beauvoir and Matthew S. Tompkins (three-time recipient of the Dallas-Fort Worth Theater Critics Forum Award for Best Actor) as Algren, "the hard-living writer who lived on and wrote about Chicago's South Side, and with whom de Beauvoir had the most passionate, star-crossed affair of her life," according to press notes.  The off-Broadway production reunites director McLean with Rothan and Tompkins, who starred in the play's U.S. premiere at Theatre Three in Dallas in 2003.
 
Rozié has long been fascinated with the love life of Simone de Beauvoir, best known as writer of the revolutionary, incendiary feminist essay, The Second Sex (published in 1949). Beauvoir's lifelong sexual and intellectual partnership with the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre was twenty-years in progress when, in 1947, she met and fell deeply in love with Nelson Algren, the still under-appreciated writer best known for his novel The Man with the Golden Arm.  The play "provides insights into how Beauvoir forged her identity -- as an artist, intellectual and woman of passion. This new play is Beauvoir's story of love beyond conventions of marriage, or of adultery, sifting details from her published letters to Nelson Algren and her novel inspired by their relationship, The Mandarins. At her death in 1986, Beauvoir asked to be buried beside Sartre at Montparnasse wearing Algren's ring. Algren died alone in Sag Harbor, NY in 1981."
 
Presented Off-Broadway by Treetop Productions, Transatlantic Liaison has scenic and lighting design by David Lovett; and features original music by Areski Belkacem, a French composer best-known for his collaborations with singer, writer and actress Brigitte Fontaine.
 
Fabrice Rozié is the Literary Attaché and, since 2004, Director of Scholarly Exchange for the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in New York.  Rozié earned degrees in French Literature at Ecole Normale Superieure, writing his doctoral dissertation on French literature of the 1930's. He has been on the faculty of the University St. Etienne and the Political Science Institute in Paris; later, he served the Embassy in New York first as Education Director, then as chief executive of Mission France 2000, the millennial program  of the French Ministry of Culture. Transatlantic Liaison is his first play, staged at the Theatre Marigny in Paris in 2002, and the following year at Theatre Three, in Dallas, Texas.
 
In addition to her major works The Second Sex, The Mandarins and Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) edited the political journal "Les Temps Modernes" with Sartre.  Her work, A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, was published posthumously in 1998.  Algren wrote works such as Never Come Morning and A Walk on the Wild Side in addition to The Man with the Golden Arm.
 
The show will run Mondays, Wednesdays-Fridays at 8pm; Saturdays at 2 and 8pm; and Sundays at 3pm (no performances on Tuesdays). Tickets are $45. For tickets, visit TicketCentral.com or call 212-279-4200.
 


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