Maggie Siff, Pico Alexander & More to Star in ORPHEUS DESCENDING at TFANA

Theatre for a New Audience will present Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending, July 9–August 6 at Polonsky Shakespeare Center.

Orpheus Descending is TFANA’s first production of a play by Tennessee Williams and the final production of TFANA’s 22-23 Season which included: Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski by Derek Goldman and Clark Young; Des Moines by Denis Johnson; Experimental Workshop productions of Shakespeare’s Richard II and Henry IV, adapted by Dakin Matthews; and Lope De Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna, translated by Adrian Mitchell.

Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending tells the story of the passion of two outcasts—Lady Torrance, a storekeeper’s wife and daughter of a murdered Sicilian bootlegger, and Val, a wandering guitar player—and their attempt to escape from a Southern Hell. Set in a small town dry-goods store in the Deep South, Orpheus Descending is a toxic brew of racist violence, bigotry, misogyny, sexual passion, and longing for liberation.

Maggie Siff (Billions, Mad Men, and Sons of Anarchy) plays Lady Torrance and Valentine Xavier, a wandering guitar player, is performed by Pico Alexander (Catch 22, Simon Stephens’ Punk Rock, and A.R. Gurney’s What I Did Last Summer).

Erica Schmidt, Director, in her TFANA debut observes, “Orpheus Descending is about what America does to the outsider. It’s about trying to survive and create beauty, the Herculean effort towards transcendence, in a culture of racism, intolerance, and sanctioned violence. Williams said that ‘the message of absolute dread, that sense of the awful, is the desperate black root of all significant art’ and here he gives us an attempt to portray something indefinable — not only the horror of life but also the passionate, grasping, stumbling, desperate attempt we make at ecstasy before we fall.”

The Production Dramaturg is John Lahr, who won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for his acclaimed biography Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh. Lahr says, “In Orpheus Descending, Williams told his audience, ‘You will find the trail of my sleeve-worn heart.’ But that heart had changed dramatically between when the story was first minted in 1941 as Battle of Angels and sixteen years later when Orpheus Descending was staged. In his rebellion against the monolithic puritanism of his Episcopal upbringing, Williams bet his life on his imagination and romantic transformation. He embraced the unlearning of repression. ‘I, too, am beginning to feel an immense need to become a savage and to create a new world.’ Williams used this Strindberg quote as the epigraph to Battle of Angels. His hero Val Xavier—a name Williams was thinking of using as his nom de plume before he hit on ‘Tennessee’—is a hunted primitive saint, an agent of change, rattling the cage of propriety. Val is the first of many avatars of deliberate regression.

“But,” continues Lahr, “by the time he came to rewrite the play, Williams couldn’t, he said, ‘be the best part of myself anymore.’ Val is the embodiment of this moral exhaustion and Williams’s fight against the corruption of his spirit, that longing to walk on ‘heavenly grass’ as Val sings. In Orpheus Descending, Val is now a vagrant, jaded sensualist ‘fighting his own descent into a hell of his own making,’ Williams told the Miami Herald in 1956. During the gestation of Battle of Angels, Williams himself had been a pilgrim soul, a newcomer to ‘the trapeze of the flesh,’ living from hand to mouth, with a literary reputation to gain and nothing to lose. By the time the story had reached its final form in 1957, Williams was struggling with a sense that his heart had atrophied: ‘we persist, like the cactus,’ he wrote in his notebook. He had not so much transcended his wounded self as been trapped by his attempts to escape it. Val’s battle, like Williams’s, is not just with the society around him but with himself, ‘engaged in his struggle to maintain his integrity and purity…a duality not reconciled.’” 

About Tennessee Williams
 

Tennessee Williams was born in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, where his grandfather was the Episcopal clergyman. When his father, a traveling salesman, moved with his family to St. Louis some years later, both he and his sister found it impossible to settle down to city life. He entered college during the Depression and left after a couple of years to take a clerical job in a shoe company. He stayed there for two years, spending the evenings writing. He entered the University of Iowa in 1938 and completed his course, at the same time holding a large number of part-time jobs of great diversity. He received a Rockefeller fellowship in 1940 for his play Battle of Angels, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire and in 1955 for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Other plays include Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Baby Doll, The Glass Menagerie, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, The Night of the Iguana, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Two-Character Play. Tennessee Williams died in 1983.

About Erica Schmidt (Director)

Erica Schmidt (Director) most recently wrote and directed Lucy (Audible, Minetta Lane, New York Times Critic’s Pick,“seamlessly layered, extraordinarily entertaining”) and in 2019 adapted and staged Shakespeare’s Macbeth for seven schoolgirls, entitled Mac Beth (Lucille Lortel, Hunter Theater Project, New York Times Critic’s Pick,“raucously exuberant,” Drama Desk nominations for Best Direction and Revival, and Lortel nomination for Best Revival). Other credits include adaption and direction of Cyrano with The National (Goodspeed, New Group); All the Fine Boys (The New Group); Richard 2 (The Old Globe); A Month in the Country (Classic Stage Company); Taking Care of Baby (Manhattan Theatre Club); Humor Abuse (co-creator/director; MTC, The Taper; Lucille Lortel Award); Rent (Tokyo); Trust (The Play Company, Callaway Award nominee); As You Like It (The Public Theater); Debbie Does Dallas (adapted/directed Off-Broadway); and Princess Grace Award 2001. Schmidt wrote the screenplay for Cyrano (BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Best Film). 

About John Lahr (Dramaturg)

John Lahr has been a contributor to the New Yorker since 1991, where for twenty-one years he was its Senior Drama Critic, the longest run in that position in the magazine’s history. He is the author of eighteen books including Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Harold D.Vursell Award for Quality of Prose, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the first critic to win a Tony Award for co-authoring Elaine Stritch at Liberty.

The Cast

Pico Alexander (Valentine Xavier) Off-Broadway: The Portuguese Kid (MTC), What I Did Last Summer (Signature Theatre), and Punk Rock (MCC). Select Film: The Sky is Everywhere (dir. Josephine Decker, Apple), Home Again (dir. Hallie Meyers-Shyer, Open Road Films), War Machine (dir. David Michod, Netflix), Indignation (dir. James Schamus, Focus Features), A Most Violent Year (dir. JC Chandor, A24). Select TV: “Saint X” (Hulu), “Dickinson” (Apple),

“Catch-22” (Hulu), “Orange Is the New Black” (Netflix). 

Molly Kate Babos (Dolly Hamma) (she/her) is an actress and playwright. TFANA debut. NYC Theatre: Jessica’s Tenth Birthday Bash (The Tank). Education: British American Drama Academy, The New School (BFA).  

Matt DeAngelis (Dog Hamma / Clown / Second Man). Broadway: Waitress (Earl), HAIR (Woof). West End: HAIR (Woof). Tour: Waitress(Earl), Once (Svec), HAIR (Woof), American Idiot.  Off-Broadway: The Secret Life of Bees (Atlantic Theater Company). TV: “Person of Interest,” “Madam Secretary,” “Daredevil,” “EVIL,” “For Life,” “Chicago PD,” and “FBI.”   

Michael Cullen (Jabe Torrance). NY Stage: King Liz (2nd Stage); Finks (EST); Bug (Barrow ST.); Cobb (Lucille Lortel); One Shot, One Kill(Primary Stages); Bus Stop (Circle in the Square); The Subject Was Roses (Penguin Rep). TV: Law & Order (all three), The Black List, Claws, New Amsterdam, FBI Most Wanted, Blue Bloods. Film: The Place Beyond the Pines, Dead Man Walking, Clockers, Malcolm X, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. 

Gene Gillette (Pee Wee Binnings / Mr. Dubinsky / First Man). Broadway: To Kill a Mockingbird, Ensemble. National Tours: Ed Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night Time, Ted Narracot in War Horse both for The National. Regional: Macbeth at Berkeley Rep, the title role in Hamlet at the Denver Civic, Pale in Burn This at Shakespeare Santa Cruz. Television: “The Punisher,” “Elementary,” “The Good Wife,” “Law and Order: SVU.” MFA: Shakespeare Theatre’s Academy for Classical Acting 

Laura Heisler (Beulah Binnings). Broadway: Coram Boy. Off-Broadway and regional: Kin (Lortel & Drama League nominations), The Patron Saint of Sea Monsters, Doris to Darlene, and People Be Heard (dir. Erica Schmidt) (Playwrights Horizons); The Mistakes Madeline Made (Naked Angels); Everything Will Be Different (Soho Rep);  BFF (WET); The Given (Studio Dante); Too Much Memory (Rising Phoenix); Top Girls and Bus Stop (Williamstown); Build and Miss Julie (Geffen); Stunning (Woolly Mammoth); Good Faith (Yale Rep); Eurydice (world premiere, Madison Rep). TV includes: “Evil,” “Law & Order: Organized Crime,” “Chicago Med,” “The Americans,” “Elementary,” “Madam Secretary,” “Grey's Anatomy,” “The Middle,” “Bones,” “Ugly Betty,” “Numb3rs,” “The Defenders.” Film: The Harbinger, We Go On, As Good as You, Cold Souls, Coach, YellowBrickRoad. 

Prudence Wright Holmes (Sister Temple). Broadway: Happy End with Meryl Streep, Lettice and Lovage with Maggie Smith, Inherit the Wind with George C. Scott and The Light in the Piazza. Off-Broadway: Bexley, OH! at New York Theatre Workshop (a solo show written and performed by Holmes). Film: Sister Act I and II, Kingpin, In Dreams, My Own Love Song, After.Life, God’s Pocket, First Reformed, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Coen Brothers). 

Brian Keane (Sheriff Talbott). National Tour: War Horse. Theatre: London Assurance (Irish Rep), Timon of Athens (NYSF), Happy Now? (Primary), Misanthrope (CSC), All My Sons (Roundabout), 1776, (Muny), Streetcar Named Desire (Guthrie), Macbeth (Old Globe),Frost/Nixon (Bay Street), Book of Days (Arena Stage). TV: “Gilded Age,” “FBI: International,” “Dopesick,” “Billions,” “Evil,” “Kevin Can F Himself,” “Chicago P.D.,” “House of Cards,” “Blue Bloods,” “Gypsy,” “Blacklist,” “Elementary,” “Gotham,” “Good Wife,” “Person of Interest,” “Law & Order.” Film: Bear City - Trilogy.

Julia McDermott (Carol Cutrere). TFANA debut. Off-Broadway: Heroes of the Fourth Turning, by Will Arbery (Playwrights Horizons, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, OBIE and Lucille Lortel Winner for Best Ensemble and Outstanding Play). International Theater: Epiphany, by Brian Watkins (Druid Theater, Galway International Arts Festival). TV: “Women of the Movement” (ABC/Hulu), “Up Here” (Hulu), “Elsbeth” (CBS). Graduate of The Juilliard School of Drama, BFA 2019. 

Ana Reeder (Vee Talbott). Broadway: The Big Knife, Hedda Gabler, Top Girls, Sight Unseen. New York: Queens (LCT3); In the Blood(Signature); When It’s You (Keen); Happy Hour (Atlantic); The Maids (Red Bull); Radiance (LABrynth); Hedda Gabler (NYTW); Living Room in Africa (Edge); The Wooden Breeks (MCC); Small Tragedy (Playwrights Horizons, Obie); Humble Boy, An Experiment with an Air Pump (MTC); The Time of the Cuckoo (Lincoln Center). London: The Distance from Here (Almeida). Regional: A Doll’s House (Long Wharf), A Streetcar Named Desire (Williamstown). MFA: NYU.

Maggie Siff (Lady Torrance). Theatre (select): Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew (TFANA); Curse of the Starving Class (Signature Theatre); A Lie of the Mind (The New Group). Television (select): Wendy in “Billions” (Showtime), Tara in “Sons of Anarchy” (FX), Rachel Menken in “Mad Men” (AMC). Film (select): The Short History of the Long Road, A Woman/A Part, The Sweet Life, The Fifth Wave, One Percent More Humid, Concussion. MFA: NYU Tisch. 

Kate Skinner (Eva Temple). Broadway: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, Uncle Vanya. National Tour: The Graduate, Lend Me a Tenor. Off-Broadway: Amy and the Orphans, Tennessee Williams 1982, Honey Brown Eyes, The Mapmaker's Sorrow, Ashes to Ashes,Marvin's Room. Select Regional: King Charles III, All My Sons, Henry IV: Parts I and II, Other Desert Cities, Boeing Boeing. Television: “The Watcher” (Netflix), “The Affair,” “Unforgettable,” “Blue Bloods,” “Law & Order,” “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” “Law & Order: SVU,” “Boston Public.” Film: Heartworm, Mona Lisa Smile, Kiddie Ride, The River, Down the Shore, The Rage: Carrie II, Claire Dolan.  

Fiana Tóibín (Nurse Porter/The Woman). Broadway: Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Weir, Shining City. Off-Broadway: Da, Juno and the Paycock, Sive, Yeats Project (Irish Rep); Katie Roche, Temporal Powers (Mint); Mrs. Packard (McCarter); Cyrano (Shakespeare DC); Crestfall (Origin); A Lady Is Waiting (Rafter’s Road/Origin First Irish); A Streetcar Named Desire. TV: “The South Westerlies,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “The Sopranos,” “Law & Order CI.” Film: Twelve. Writer/director Dinner with Lenny. 

James Waterston (David Cutrere). Broadway: Enemy of the People (MTC). Off-Broadway: Love and Information (NYTW), Buffalo Gal(Primary Stages), The Importance of Being Earnest (BAM), As You Like It (Public), Parents' Evening (Flea). Regional: Private Lives (STC), Chinglish (Goodman), Othello (CSC), 12th Night (Old Globe), seven seasons at Williamstown. TV: “Inventing Anna,” “Halston,” “Modern Love,” “The Deuce,” “Red Oaks,” “Six Feet Under.”  Film: Human Capital, Certainty, Dead Poets Society. Upcoming: La Cocina with Rooney Mara and Brutus in Julius Caesar touring France (fall 2024) 

Dathan B. Williams (Uncle Pleasant). TFANA debut. Former A.A.D of The Harlem Shakespeare Festival. Broadway: Show Boat. Off-Broadway: Christmas in Hell (NY Premiere) plus eight others. Regional: The Railway Children plus 43 others. National Tour: Show Boatplus three others. International: Two Seasons at the Stratford Festival (’91 Guthrie Award). Directing credits include: Off-Broadway: Me and Steppin’ (The New Federal Theater). 

About the Creative Team

Amy Rubin (Scenic Designer) is a designer of environments for theater, opera, and dance. Recent designs: Omar (LA Opera/Spoleto), Lucy(Audible Theatre), Most Happy (Williamstown Theatre Festival), Octet (Signature Theater), Cyrano (The New Group), Thom Pain (based on nothing) (Signature Theater), Snowy Day (Houston Grand Opera), Gloria: A Life (Daryl Roth Theatre), Miles for Mary (Playwrights Horizons), Acquanetta (Prototype Festival), Aging Magician (New Victory Theatre). Amy’s work has been featured at American Repertory Theater, McCarter Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Walker Arts Center, MassMoCA, Z Space, The Kimmel Center, and numerous TED Talks.

Jennifer Moeller (Costume Designer). Broadway: Camelot (Tony nomination), Pictures From Home, Clyde’s (Tony nomination, Drama Desk Award), Sweat. Off-Broadway: The Comeuppance (Signature), The Wrong Man (MCC), Mlima’s Tale (Lucille Lortel nomination), Tiny Beautiful Things (The Public), Aubergine (Playwrights Horizons), Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare in the Park). Regional: Guthrie, Goodman, Kennedy Center, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Arena Stage, The Old Globe, Williamstown Theatre Festival, McCarter, Oregon Shakespeare Festival. TV: “Dickinson” (Apple TV+).

David Weiner (Lighting Designer) is pleased to be working with TFANA again where he previously designed The Merchant of Venice & Jew of Malta with F. Murray Abraham, Julius Caesar, and Saved. Over 100+ productions on Broadway, Off-Broadway and in regional theaters across the country over 30 years. Architecture: numerous projects including award winning restaurants Tatiana, Al Coro, Saga, Crown Shy, Cote (NY, Miami, Singapore) and Naminori.

Justin Ellington (Sound Designer/Composer) is a multi-award winning, Tony-nominated sound designer and composer. Theatre For A New Audience credits include: He Brought Her Heart Back In A Box, The Winter’s Tale, The Merchant Of Venice. Broadway: Ohio State Murders,Topdog/Underdog, Pass Over, Clyde’s, for colored girls, Other Desert Cities. Additional theaters include: Lincoln Center, Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, Goodman, Guthrie, Royal Shakespeare Company & The Old Vic.

Lorenzo Pisoni (Physical Movement Coordinator). Broadway: Parade, MJ, Almost Famous, Gary, Beetlejuice, Frozen, Noises Off. Off-Broadway: Lucy, Mac Beth, All the Fine Boys, Harlequin Studies. West End: Frozen, Mary Poppins, Beauty and the Beast. As a performer, Lorenzo has worked in circuses and in theatre where his work on and off Broadway has been recognized with Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, Obie, and Outer Critics Circle awards.

Justin Cox (Props Supervisor) is a Texas-born, New York-based art director and production designer, specializing in television, film, and live performances. Coming from a lineage of artists and artisans, Justin learned the value of hands-on creation. His unique aesthetic and appreciation for the functionality of objects and environments have served Lady Gaga, Broadway, and the greater storytelling community. 

Andrew Wade (Voice Director). The Royal Shakespeare Company: 1987–2003 (voice assistant), 1990–2003 (head of voice). Since 2003: The Acting Company, Guthrie Theater, Stella Adler Studio (master teacher voice and Shakespeare). Currently: TFANA (resident voice and text director), The Public Theater (director of voice), Juilliard (adjunct faculty Drama Division). Broadway: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One and Two (U.S. head of voice and dialect), King Lear with Glenda Jackson (voice coach), Matilda (director of voice and national tour), A Christmas Carol and tour, A Bronx Tale the Musical. Film: Shakespeare in Love. Workshops and lectures worldwide. Fellow of Rose Bruford College.

Xavier Clark (Dialect Coach). Bio to come.

Shane Schnetzler (Production Stage Manager) (he/him). TFANA: Soho Rep’s Fairview, Des Moines, The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, Why?, Julius Caesar, The Emperor, He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Tamburlaine, Fiasco’s Cymbeline. Off-Broadway: Crumbs from the Table of Joy (Keen); Seven Deadly Sins (Tectonic); Noura, This Flat Earth, The Profane, Rancho Viejo, Familiar (Playwrights); Napoli, Brooklyn, Look Back in Anger (Roundabout); The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, The Comedy of Errors (NYSF).

University of the South

The University of the South, a national ranked liberal arts college and Episcopal seminary, is the beneficiary of the Tennessee Williams’ estate, including the copyrights to all his works. This gift was made as a memorial to Williams’ grandfather, the Reverend Walter E. Dakin, who studied at the University’s seminary in 1895.

The Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund is used to support the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, and the School of Letters. The Fund also supports scholarships for students who wish to pursue creative writing and fellowships which are granted annually to budding playwrights or authors. Those fellows include Ann Patchett, Claire Messud, Tony Early, and Mark Richard. The Tennessee Williams Center houses the University’s theater department, and a portion of the Fund supports the department and its theatrical productions.

Visit www.sewanee.edu for more information.

Performance Schedule

Performances of Orpheus Descending take place at Polonsky Shakespeare Center (262 Ashland Pl, Brooklyn) July 9, 11–16, 18, 19, 21–23, 25–30, and August 1–6 at 7:30pm, July 20 at 7pm, with matinee performances on July 16, 22, 23, 29, 30, and August 5 & 6 at 2pm. 

Members of the press are welcome:

Sat, July 15  @ 7:30pm

Sun, July 16 @ 2pm

Sun, July 16 @ 7:30pm

Orpheus Descending opens Tues, July 18 with reviews embargoed until 10pm.

·         Thursday, July 20 at 7pm is a New Deal Night performance followed by Reflections Talkback

·         7:30pm on Sunday, July 23, will be a Pay What You Can performance

·         The 2pm performance on Sunday, July 23, will be open captioned

   

Single Tickets

Single ticket types include Full Price Ticket: $90-$100 and Premium: $125. New Deal tickets for those aged 30 and under, and for full-time students of any age—are available for all performances for $20, can be purchased in advance or day-of online, by phone, or at the box office with valid ID(s) required at pickup.

About Theatre for a New Audience

Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, and led by Horowitz and Managing Director, Dorothy Ryan, Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) is home for Shakespeare and other contemporary playwrights. It nurtures artists, culture, and community. Recognizing that each audience is new and different from the last one, TFANA is dedicated to forging an exchange between artist and playgoer that is immediate and direct, and to the ongoing search for a living, human theatre.

With Shakespeare as its supreme guide, TFANA explores the ever-changing forms of world theatre and builds a dialogue spanning centuries between the language and ideas of Shakespeare and diverse authors, past and present. TFANA is committed to building long-term associations with artists from around the world and supporting the development of plays, translations, and productions through residences, workshops, and commissions. TFANA performs for an audience of all ages and backgrounds; is devoted to economic access; and promotes a vibrant exchange of ideas through its humanities and education programs.

TFANA’s productions have played nationally, internationally and on Broadway. In 2001, it became the first American theatre company invited to bring a production of Shakespeare to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

TFANA created and runs the largest in-depth program to introduce Shakespeare and classic drama in New York City’s Public Schools. Since its inception in 1984, the program has served more than 140,000 students.

In 2013, TFANA opened its first permanent home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center (PSC), in the Brooklyn Cultural District. The heart of PSC is its performance space: the 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage, a uniquely flexible space with extraordinary acoustics, capable of multiple configurations between stage and audience; as well as the 50-seat Theodore C. Rogers Studio.

In addition to productions, TFANA supports ongoing artistic development through the Merle Debuskey Studio Program, which provides artists with residencies and workshops to create and explore outside the pressures of full production.

TFANA honors the Lenape and Canarsie People, on whose ancestral homeland Polonsky Shakespeare Center is built. The organization is committed to rethinking the stories it tells about our history and our connection to each other.

TFANA’s 2022-23 Season is dedicated to Celebrating the Memory of Peter Brook. From 2008-2019, TFANA was honored to present seven New York Premieres of works by Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Beckett and new plays by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne directed by Peter or co-directed by Peter and Marie-Hélène.

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