THE MASQUE OF QUEENS By Maxwell Anderson Has Its Chicago Premiere

First Flight presents the Chicago premiere of a play by Maxwell Anderson: The Masque of Queens. Presented as a staged reading and featuring 13 actors, The Masque of Queens' one-time performance is a benefit for Chicago's Season of Concern, an organization that helps Chicago theatre professionals in times of need. The benefit performance date is Sunday March 31, 2019 at 6 p.m. at the iO Theater, 1501 N Kingsbury St, in Chicago. Suggested donation is $20 and tickets are available at the door. Email firstflight2018@gmail.com for reservations and for more information. The iO Theater can be reached at: 312-929-2401 and online at https://www.ioimprov.com/event/1835325-masque-queens-staged-chicago/ .

Maxwell Anderson's play The Masque of Queens written in 1954 became his third in a trilogy that includes his plays Mary of Scotland and Elizabeth the Queen. With The Masque of Queens, Maxwell Anderson draws on his own experience of accumulating years and delivers to his audience an aging Elizabeth. The old queen continues to rule with absolute control, manipulating those around her, dealing shrewdly with all threats to her power. In her lonely state, she is assailed at moments by doubt for condemning her romantic favorite Lord Essex to death only seven months earlier. Elizabeth's tragic inner conflict makes her once more a compelling figure for a play. The Masque of Queens was first presented as a staged reading on September 31, 1984 at the Ethel Kweskin Barn Theater in Stamford, CT. It had its first fully staged performance at Theatre in the Square in Marietta, Georgia on September 3, 1986. First Flight, a new theatre company devoted to presenting plays by Maxwell Anderson, returns to the iO Theatre with a single staged reading performance of this rarely performed play as a benefit for Chicago's Season of Concern. Last December at the iO Theater they presented a reading of Anderson's never published and never produced 1924 play Sea-Wife.

For this benefit reading the cast includes Diane Dorsey as Queen Elizabeth I, Frank Farrell as Lord Robert Cecil, Julie Proudfoot as Frances Devereaux, recent widow of Lord of Essex, Kevin Blair as Earl of Clanricarde, Leslee Crisman as Jane, The Queen's Maid, Lorel Janiszewski as the Countess of Derby, Elizabeth Kelly as the Countess of Arundell, Rhianonon Koehler as Lady Windsor, David Mink as Haggis and Earl of Caithness, Jeanne Scurek as Lady Anne Winter, Darren Stephens as Ben Jonson, Timothe Stites as Speaker of the Commons, the Physician and a Page and Dan Scurek as the Reader of the Stage Directions.

As in the 1920s the American Theater belonged to Eugene O'Neill, in the 1930s it belonged to Maxwell Anderson (1888 - 1959). Anderson's productive period stretched from 1923 to 1958, the year before he died; there were few seasons when a new Maxwell Anderson play was not presented on Broadway. Among his best-known are Elizabeth the Queen, Mary of Scotland, Anne of the Thousand Days, Key Largo, Valley Forge, High Tor, Winterset, and Knickerbocker Holiday. There was never an American dramatist more admired in his time whose life was so hidden from his public. Anderson discouraged any attempts to write books about him, granted but eight known interviews to the press, and in them gave tantalizingly few details about his personal life.

First Flight is devoted to presenting the plays of 20th century playwright Maxwell Anderson as well as other playwrights who bring verse and poetic drama to the theater. Through a focus on the voice, text and story, First Flight is dedicated to the dynamic performance and exploration of those plays and playwrights whose use of language heightens senses and enriches lives.