Raven Theatre to Stage Midwest Premiere of Horton Foote's THE OLD FRIENDS in 2016

Michael Menendian, co-founding Artistic Director of Raven Theatre, has announced that Raven has been granted rights to mount the only new production of Horton Foote's The Old Friends since its World Premiere staging in fall 2013 by the Signature Theatre Company in New York. Raven Theatre's production will run January 27 to March 26, 2016, under Menendian's direction.

Foote, who died in 2009, was the author of nearly 100 plays, teleplays and screenplays; including The Trip to Bountiful, Tender Mercies and To Kill a Mockingbird. With Raven's production of The Old Friends, Horton Foote will become the first playwright in Raven's 32-year history to be represented in three successive seasons. The company's first Foote play was last season's The Trip to Bountiful, and their second will be their upcoming Chicago premiere of Dividing the Estate, starting performances next week, on Tuesday, January 27, 2015. The playwright's daughter, actress Hallie Foote, visited Raven on January 13 and 14 to observe a rehearsal of Dividing the Estate and to speak to a public audience about her father's work, said "I'm thrilled to see Raven Theatre Company's commitment to my father's body of work and I'm happy to support their efforts in presenting his plays to Chicago audiences."

Foote, who died in 2009, originally wrote a draft of The Old Friends in the mid-1960s. It was given a workshop production in 1982 and a reading by Signature in 2002, but wasn't fully staged until Signature's World Premiere production in September 2013. Warmly received by New York critics and audiences, that production directed by Michael Wilson was remounted at the Alley in Houston, Texas in August 2014, with Betty Buckley, Hallie Foote and Veanne Cox repeating their roles as Mamie, Sibyl and Julia.

Raven Theatre is the first company since the Signature - Alley staging to be granted a license for The Old Friends. Set in the 1960s in the fictional town of Harrison, Texas, The Old Friends tells of the combative members of two longtime old-money Texas families. When hometown beauty Sibyl returns to Harrison after a long absence, not-quite-forgotten passions and jealousies resurface in a wildly funny play that is (uncharacteristically for Foote) brutally satiric in its depiction of small town people with big money.

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