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Actors Dana Ivey and Robert Bogue To Star in “Suddenly, Last Summer” At Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival
One Time Only Performance -Sunday, September 26, 2010, 6pm
Festival Tickets On Sale Now
(Provincetown, MA,) TW Festival Curator David Kaplan announced today that award-winning stage and screen actor Dana Ivey will star in the classic Tennessee Williams’ role of Mrs. Venable in a staged reading of “Suddenly, Last Summer” at this year’s TW Festival. Robert Bogue, well-known for his regular role as A. C. Mallet on “Guiding Light,” will play Dr. ‘Sugar.’
“TW Fest audiences can look forward to some heat from these wonderful actors,” Kaplan said. “It’s an exciting idea: Dana Ivey’s fierce intelligence fueling Mrs. Venable’s cunning and Robert Bogue’s charm and wit as ‘Dr. Sugar,’ who Mrs. Venable mistakes for sweet. Should he cut out part of a young girl’s brain? What a thing for the two of them to spar about!”
This popular Williams one-act play unfolds as a crime story told by a traumatized young woman. A young doctor, tempted by a rich woman who might fund his research, must decide with whom to side. Jodie Markell, the director of the recently released film written by Williams: “The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond” will direct a staged reading of the play in a one time only performance on September 26.
Dana Ivey
I am looking forward to discovering a town where Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams worked and where much iconic American theatre was created. –Dana Ivey
Dana Ivey is familiar to film audiences through her many supporting roles in such high-profile films as The Color Purple, Sleepless in Seattle, and Legally Blonde 2, and very well-known to theater audiences through her many highly acclaimed and award-winning performances.
A Georgia native, Ivey made her Broadway debut in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter. Her outstanding performance in Driving Miss Daisy (as the title character) earned her an Obie and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Dana Ivey has received five Tony Award nominations: for Butley, Heartbreak House, Sunday in the Park with George, The Last Night of Ballyhoo and The Rivals. She also won an Obie for Quartermaine’s Terms and Drama Desk Awards for her work in Ballyhoo and Sex and Longing.
Ivey has brilliantly realized the roles of formidable mothers before, including Tennessee Williams’ Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie at Williamstown, Big Mama in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof at Kennedy Center, and Mrs. Warren in Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession.
Robert Bogue
Having the opportunity to call myself an actor has been good. Making a living as a TV actor is great. Having the opportunity to speak the hypnotic poetry of Tennessee Williams is...priceless. -Robert Bogue
Raised in Kansas and Kentucky, Robert Bogue graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Colorado College with a degree in International Political Economics but chose to pursue a career in theater. He started acting in New York as an original founding member of the New Group Theater Company. Recently, he played the role of A. C. Mallet on “Guiding Light” from 2007 until the soap ended in 2009.
On stage, Bogue has appeared on Broadway in "Three Sisters" and in the Olivier Award winning production of "Burning Blue" in London's West End. Bogue has made several television appearances on hit series including the recurring role of prisoner Jason Cramer on "Oz." He was in the independent films "Frost" and "The Dissection of Thanksgiving." Bogue also co-wrote, co-produced and appeared in the feature film "Backseat," which received the Audience Award at the 2005 Austin Film Festival. He can be seen in the movie “The Good Guy” in theaters now.
Jodie Markell
I was cast as Laura Wingfield in a high school production of The Glass Menagerie. From that moment on, I was hooked! I read everything I could find by Tennessee Williams by the time I was 17. As a teenager with artistic tendencies, who felt a bit different, I felt a real affinity for Williams' sensitive characters as they searched for something authentic in a harsh world. – Jodie Markell
Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, filmmaker and actress Jodie Markell has been discovering and rediscovering Tennessee Williams for a long time. She studied theater from an early age and moved to New York to study at Circle-in-the-Square Theater. She helped rediscover the Tennessee Williams' play Confessional, and produced it as a New York premiere. As an actress, she received the OBIE award for Sophie Treadwell's Machinal, and as a filmmaker she received the Lumiere Award and the Moviemaker Magazine Breakthrough Award for her short film “Why I Live at the P.O.,” based on Eudora Welty's classic story.
Markell helped rediscover a never before produced Tennessee Williams’ film script and made her feature film directing debut with “Loss of a Teardrop Diamond” in 2009. The LA Times praised it as a “A film to savor. Rich in ways that are all too rare these days.”
Tickets for this staged reading are $32.50 for general seating; $47.50 for preferred seating.
Tickets for this and all Tennessee Williams Theater Festival productions Thursday September 23 – Sunday, September 26 are available online at www.twptown.org.
About this year’s Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival:
For UNDER THE INFLUENCE artists from Los Angeles to New York and Chicago to Florida will converge on Provincetown in performance of well-known works by Tennessee Williams, complemented by work that inspired him and work that he inspired in today’s artists. In addition to Suddenly, Last Summer, some highlights of performances of plays, dance, music, and art, throughout the seaside village that inspired the writer during his early years are:
- “Orpheus Descending” by Tennessee Williams, and a companion gallery exhibition of artists in Orpheus in the Galleries
- The World Premiere of Williams never seen short play, “American Gothic.”
- “Diff’rent” by Eugene O’Neill, which Williams saw as a young man in Provincetown.
- “The Jazz Funeral of Stella Brooks,” inspired by Williams’ friendship with the jazz singer known as “the white Billie Holiday.”
For the full program of performances and events, see www.twptown.org/.
Attached are photos of Dana Ivey, Robert Bogue, Jodie Markell
