Rattlestick to Welcome Vanessa Redgrave for One-Night-Only LAST TRAIN TO PARIS Reading

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater artistic director David Van Asselt and managing director Brian Long have announced that Vanessa Redgrave will perform a one-night-only reading of a dramatic adaptation of the novel Last Train to Paris by Michele Zackheim on Monday, March 30 at 7pm at the Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce Street. Jazzmaster 2012 Jimmy Owens will accompany Redgrave, performing his musical compositions on the flugelhorn and trumpet, joined by Kenny Davis on bass. Leonard Lopate will introduce the evening, which will be followed by a reception at AOC restaurant where Zackheim will sign copies of her novel.

Tickets are $75-$150 and available for purchase by visiting www.rattlestick.org or by phoning Ovationtix at 866.811.411.

Vanessa Redgrave played in Jesse Eisenberg's The Revisionist in the winter/spring of 2013 at Cherry Lane, the perfect theater for a great new play. She chose Cherry Lane to read selected passages from Michele Zackheim's Last Train to Paris in benefit of the Rattlestick. When jazzmaster Jimmy Owens agreed to partner Vanessa she knew this would be a very special evening, to honour Rattlestick at Cherry Lane, and her friend Michele Zackheim. Vanessa has just completed filming for Jim Sheridan's The Secret Scriptures in Ireland, and the narrative for "Call the Midwife" the latest series on television in the UK. She looks forward to play with James Earl Jones in The Gin Game, this autumn.

Jimmy Owens has over forty-five years of experience as a Jazz trumpeter, composer, arranger, lecturer, and music education consultant. His experience covers a wide range of international musical achievement, which includes extensive work as a studio musician, soloist, bandleader, and composer of orchestral compositions, movie scores, and ballets. Jimmy is one of the few trumpeters of his generation who played as a sideman with such extraordinary Jazz leaders as Lionel Hampton, Hank Crawford, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Duke Ellington, Billy Taylor, and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Band, among others. As a result, his musical and personal recollections are unique. He can share personal recollections of being a sideman in some of the most exciting bands in the history of Jazz music. His anecdotes are priceless: playing with Cootie Williams, Sweets Edison, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie in an historic concert at Yale where Eubie Blake and Paul Robeson were in the audience; sitting in with Miles Davis at the age of fifteen, and many others. Throughout his long career, Jimmy has consistently emphasized in both his performances and recordings a deep understanding of the blues as well as beautiful and articulate emotional projection on ballads. As a reviewer stated in All About Jazz regarding Jimmy's performance on One More: The Summary - Music of Thad Jones, Vol 2 (2006), an all-star recording on which Jimmy appeared - "Jimmy Owens ... proves that he's better than ever, whether employing a breathy, vocal quality (Little Pixie), a smooth flugelhorn sound (Three in One), or brilliant and elliptical Jones-like melodic ideas (Rejoice)."

Michele Zackheim worked for many years in the visual arts as a fresco muralist, installation artist, print-maker, and painter. She is the recipient of two NEA awards; her work has been widely exhibited and is in many permanent collections, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., the Albuquerque Museum, the Grey Art Gallery of New York University, and the New York Public Library. Of her transition from visual artist to author, she writes: "Over time, random words began to appear on my canvases...then poems...then elaborate fragments of narratives. I began to think more about writing and less about the visual world." Her first book, Violette's Embrace (Riverhead, 1996), is a fictional biography of the French writer Violette Leduc. It was followed by the acclaimed Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl (Riverhead, 1999), a nonfiction account of the mystery of the lost illegitimate daughter of Mileva and Albert Einstein. Broken Colors (Europa Editions, 2007), her first novel, is the story of a visual artist and how her life intersects with her work. Zackheim's most recent work, Last Train to Paris, on which this evening is based, was published in January 2014 by Europa Editions.

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater is an award-winning company that has produced over sixty world premieres in the past nineteen seasons and was the recipient of the 2007 Ross Wetzsteon Memorial OBIE Award for developing new and innovative work. Previous plays include Two Boys in a Bed, Message to Michael, Carpool, Volunteer Man, A Trip to the Beach, Ascendancy, Stuck, Vick's Boy, The Messenger, Saved or Destroyed, Neil's Garden, My Special Friend, Faster, Bliss, St. Crispin's Day, Where We're Born, Five Flights, Boise, Finer Noble Gases, That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play, God Hates The Irish: The Ballad of Armless Johnny, Miss Julie, Acts of Mercy: passion-play, Cagelove, It Goes Without Saying, Dark Matters, Stay, American Sligo, Rag and Bone, War, Geometry of Fire, The Amish Project, Killers and Other Family, Post No Bills, Blind, Little Doc, underneathmybed, There Are No More Big Secrets, The Hallway Trilogy, Carson McCullers Talks About Love, The Wood, Asuncion, Horsedreams, Yosemite, Massacre (Sing to Your Children), 3C, Through the Yellow Hour, A Summer Day, The Revisionist starring Vanessa Redgrave and Jesse Eisenberg, Buyer & Cellar (2013 Drama Desk and Outer Critic Circle Awards for Outstanding Solo Performance), Basilica, Charles Ives Take Me Home, One Night..., How to Make Friends and then Kill Them, The Correspondent, Ode to Joy, The Few, A FABLE, the Off-Broadway GLAAD Award-nominated hit The Last Sunday in June, Craig Wright's The Pavilion (Drama Desk nominee-Outstanding Play of 2005) and Lady (Drama Desk nominee-Outstanding Play of 2008), The Aliens by Annie Baker (2010 Obie Award winner for Best New American Play), as well as The Hilltown Plays (2014 OBIE Award). www.rattlestick.org.

Photo Credit: Rex USA

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