Goodman Theatre

For Immediate Release

(April 15, 2008 - Chicago, IL) For Goodman's Theatre's 2009 exploration of Eugene O'Neill, Artistic Director Robert Falls views the 20th century "father of the American drama" through a 21st century international lens: a handful of the world's leading theater companies bring to Chicago their highly contemporary, inventive interpretations of O'Neill's dramas to plumb the depths of this important playwright. Toneelgroep Amsterdam presents its mixed-media production of Rouw Siert Electra (Mourning Becomes Electra) directed by Ivo van Hove; Brazil's Companhia Triptal, who since 2002 has focused its artistic mission on O'Neill, presents three out of four of O'Neill's "sea plays," directed by Andre Garolli under the collective title Homens ao Mar (Sea Men) - the plays are Zona de Guerra (In the Zone), Longa Viagem De Volta Pra Casa (The Long Voyage Home) and Cardiff (Bound East for Cardiff); and New York's The Wooster Group brings its production of The Emperor Jones, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte and featuring Kate Valk reprising her "riveting, haunting and altogether astonishing" (New York Times) performance in the title role. These productions are mounted around the previously-announced Festival centerpiece, Desire Under the Elms directed by Falls, and featuring his longtime collaborator Brian Dennehy. The O'Neill Festival runs January through March 2009 in both the Albert and Owen Theatres. Still to be announced in the Festival is an additional Chicago-based production, as well as ancillary programming.

"Over the past two decades and four landmark productions, this 20th century definitive playwright has been a source of constant inspiration for me. I am proud to give Chicago audiences the chance to experience him in the way he is being produced today: through bold, exciting interpretations and executions of plays from the world's leading theater companies," said Artistic Director Robert Falls. "Through mesmerizing productions that are sometimes sexy, challenging and outrageous, the Toneelgroep, The Wooster Group and Companhia Triptal deliver a heightened perspective and expanded understanding of O'Neill's genius."

The world programming component of the Eugene O'Neill Festival expands the international reputation that Goodman Theatre has established over the years with productions of The Merchant of Venice in London, Paris and Hamburg; Death of a Salesman in London; Galileo Galilei in London and The Iceman Cometh in Dublin. The biennial Latino Theatre Festival (taking place August 8-24, 2008) has provided an opportunity for audiences to experience outstanding work from Spain, Mexico and Brazil over the past six years. "In a world in which globalization is a reality, it is essential that outstanding work from the US travels abroad and, at the same time, that Americans experience the cultural life of the rest of the world," said Falls.

Tickets for most programs and events of the Eugene O'Neill Festival will go on sale Fall 2008. Subscribers receive priority ordering privileges; season subscriptions, which include Desire Under the Elms, are now onsale at www.GoodmanTheatre.Org/Subscribe or call 312.443.3800.

About the Plays and Companies

Toneelgroep Amsterdam
Rouw Siert Electra (Mourning Becomes Electra)
Directed by Ivo Van Hove, featuring the original Dutch cast
Presented in Dutch with English supertitles
A United States Premiere - a limited one-week engagement in the Owen

Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the "leading Dutch theater company" (New York Times) and the Netherlands largest repertory theater, brings its sexy, highly contemporary production of Rouw Siert Electra (Mourning Becomes Electra) to the Goodman for its US premiere. Ivo van Hove, the Toneelgroep's artistic director, reassembles his original Dutch cast for a limited engagement in the Owen. Based on Aeschylus's Orestean trilogy, O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra is an American family tragedy, set on the Mannon family estate. Radiating an electrifying intensity, the Toneelgroep's production uses multi-media presence to create a once-in-a-lifetime "intelligent and seizing" (Provincial Dagbladen) theatergoing experience. Toneelgroep Amsterdam presents contemporary theater of an international standard, produced from its home base, the Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam. In addition to a resident season in Amsterdam, Toneelgroep is dedicated to international collaboration with organizations throughout Europe, as well as New York Theatre Workshop and Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Companhia Triptal of Brazil
Homens ao Mar (Sea Men) including productions of three one-act plays:
Cardiff (Bound East for Cardiff)
Zona De Guerra (In the Zone)
Longa Viagem de Volta Pra Casa (The Long Voyage Home)
Directed by Andre Garolli
Presented in Portuguese
A United States Premiere - Plays will run in repertory over 3 weekends in the Owen

Companhia Triptal brings three out of four of O'Neill's cycle of "Sea Plays" to Goodman Theatre. Written between 1914 and 1917, the "Sea Plays" are based on real experiences of the still very young author when he served in the merchant marines and traveled to Central and South America and southern Africa. The cycle introduces many of the themes that O'Neill explores in his later full-length dramas: loneliness, death, hope and friendship-as well as his own obsession with the sea. Of all the plays that O'Neill wrote in this initial phase of his career, he considered the four-part cycle concerning the S.S. Glencairn most finished. The cyclical character of these plays is critical, yet purely accidental: neither the author nor George Cram Cook-O'Neill's mentor and director of the Provincetown Players who had staged all of O'Neill's productions from this period-saw them as a cycle. Except for the integrated characters from the crew of a British freighter, the parts were considered independent. Even when they became considered as a cycle, O'Neill never arrived at a fixed order of presentation; chronologically written, however, the sequence began with Bound East for Cardiff followed by Moonlight on the Caribbean (not included in the Goodman's O'Neill Festival), The Long Voyage Home and finally In the Zone.

Based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Companhia Triptal was founded in 1990. Since 2002, the company has focused on the works of O'Neill, specifically the "Sea Plays," produced under the collective title Homens ao Mar (Sea Men). In Cardiff (Bound East For Cardiff), the sailors' precarious working conditions are presented to explore solitude, death and solidarity. In Zona De Guerra (In The Zone), fear and terror overcome diversity. In Longa Viagem De Volta Pra Casa (The Long Voyage Home), the author creates a sort of tale to explore the forces that tie men to the sea.

For the Goodman's O'Neill Festival, these three plays are performed with a total cast of 14 actors, and run in repertory over three weekends in the Owen.

The Wooster Group
The Emperor Jones
Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte
Featuring Kate Valk, Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd
A Chicago premiere - limited one-week engagement in the Owen

The New York-based The Wooster Group, known for its radical stagings of classical texts, brings The Emperor Jones to Goodman Theatre. Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte and featuring Kate Valk in the title role, this 60-minute interpretation premiered in 1993 and over the next 15 years received critical and popular acclaim throughout the US and Europe.

A rarely-produced American masterpiece widely considered to be the work that launched Eugene O'Neill's career, The Emperor Jones uses a mix of realism and expressionism to tell the story of Brutus Jones, an African American former Pullman porter with a checkered past. Having escaped a life sentence in prison for murder, Brutus establishes himself as the "self-appointed emperor" of a West Indian Island. The narrative follows his flight from both the natives he has exploited and his own haunted past.

"Just as the Playwrights' Theatre provided a home for O'Neill's early work, the Wooster Group provides a home for its contemporary interpretation" (The New Yorker). An internationally acclaimed collective of artists, The Wooster Group has created new work for the theater, dance and media for more than 30 years. Under the direction of Elizabeth LeCompte, the Group creates theater pieces that are constructed as assemblages of juxtaposed elements: both modern and classic texts, found materials, films and videos, dance and movement, multi-track scoring and an architectonic approach to theater design. All pieces in the repertory have toured widely in the US and Europe, as well as to Asia, Australia, Canada and South America. Founding and original company members include Jim Clayburgh, Willem Dafoe, Spalding Gray, Elizabeth LeCompte, Peyton Smith, Kate Valk and Ron Vawter.

Desire Under the Elms
Featuring Brian Dennehy
Directed by Robert Falls
January 2009
In the Albert

Sparked by the dark hollows and brilliant imaginings of his subconscious, master playwright Eugene O'Neill conceived Desire Under the Elms as he slept one night, resulting in a work with the powerful emotional pitch of a fever dream. Elder Ephraim Cabot returns to his remote New England farm with his third wife-the young, alluring, headstrong Abbie-setting his three disapproving grown sons on an emotional rollercoaster and bitter fight for their inheritance. When Ephraim's youngest son Elben sets his sights on Abbie, the resulting tempest brings tragic consequences. First produced in 1924, Desire Under the Elms hauntingly mingles love and loathing.

Falls, Dennehy and O'Neill

Artistic Director Robert Falls and his longtime collaborator Brian Dennehy once again team up for Desire Under the Elms. Over the past 20 years at the Goodman, Dennehy has delivered towering performances in four O'Neill works, each directed by Falls. The first collaboration was The Iceman Cometh (1990), the epic portrait of hope and disillusionment with Dennehy starring as hardware salesman and pipedream-buster Theodore "Hickey" Hickman-and a cast that included Hope Davis, Denis O'Hare, Ernest Perry, Jr. and James Cromwell. The production was named by Time and USA Today one of the 10 best American theater productions of the 1991/1992 season and was subsequently hailed as the highpoint of the 33rd annual Dublin Theatre Festival. In 1996, Falls and Dennehy returned to O'Neill-this time with the 1936 tale of tragic self-delusion, A Touch of the Poet, featuring Dennehy as the tyrannical Con Melody, Pamela Payton-Wright as his long-suffering wife, and Jenny Bacon as his rebellious daughter. Six years later O'Neill's masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night, arrived on the Goodman stage with Dennehy as the vain, selfish patriarch James Tyrone. The Broadway remount of the production two years later-featuring Dennehy, Vanessa Redgrave, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Robert Sean Leonard-won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play, with Dennehy and Redgrave each earning the prizes for Best Actor and Actress, respectively. Finally, in 2004, Falls staged the posthumously published one-act, Hughie, with Dennehy as the big-time talker and small-time gambler Erie Smith-a production for which director and actor will reunite for a production at Canada's Stratford Festival, June 18 - August 31, 2008.

About Goodman Theatre

Named the country's Best Regional Theatre by Time magazine (2003), Goodman Theatre is a leader in the American theater, internationally recognized for its artists, productions and educational programs since its founding in 1925. Artistic Director Robert Falls and Executive Director Roche Schulfer's forward-thinking leadership has earned the Goodman unparalleled artistic distinction, garnered hundreds of awards-including the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre (1992)-and moved dozens of plays from Chicago to stages in New York and abroad. Central to its commitment to the reinvestigation of classics and development of new plays and artists is the Goodman's Artistic Collective, including Frank Galati, Henry Godinez, Steve Scott, Chuck Smith, Regina Taylor and Mary Zimmerman. The largest not-for-profit theater in Chicago, the Goodman moved in 2000 into a brand new state-of-the-art complex which houses two principal theaters: the 856-seat Albert Ivar Goodman Theatre and the 400-seat flexible Owen Bruner Goodman Theatre. Board Chairman is Shawn M. Donnelley and Alice Young Sabl is president of the Women's Board. American Airlines is the Exclusive Airline of Goodman Theatre. Kraft Foods is the Principal Sponsor of the Goodman's free Student Subscription Series.

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