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Dear Friend, STC Board of Trustees Table of Contents Last season I had the good Hughie: Eugene O’Neill’s fortune to direct Eugene Chamber Sonata O’Neill’s epic Strange by Drew Lichtenberg 6 Interlude, a play I have Board of Trustees W. Mike House Emeritus Trustees wanted to direct my entire Michael R. Klein, Chair Jerry J. Jasinowski R. Robert Linowes*, Title Page 9 Robert E. Falb, Vice Chair Norman D. Jemal Founding Chairman life. There are echoes of John Hill, Treasurer Jeffrey M. Kaplan James B. Adler About the Playwright 11 that play in Hughie, which Pauline Schneider, Secretary Scott Kaufmann Heidi L. Berry* similarly explores timeless themes (though, Michael Kahn, Artistic Director Abbe D. Lowell David A. Brody* Cast 13 Eleanor Merrill Melvin S. Cohen* I will admit, in a less time intensive way). As Trustees Melissa A. Moss Ralph P. Davidson Cast Biographies 14 our first production in the New Year,Hughie Nicholas W. Allard Robert S. Osborne James F. Fitzpatrick Ashley Allen Stephen M. Ryan Dr. Sidney Harman* Direction and offers a chance for us to remember those from Stephen E. Allis George P. Stamas Lady Manning our past and reflect on how they have shaped Anita M. Antenucci Bill Walton Kathleen Matthews Design Biographies 15 Jeffrey D. Bauman Lady Westmacott William F. McSweeny our present. Afsaneh Beschloss Rob Wilder V. Sue Molina About STC 18 ® Landon Butler Suzanne S. Youngkin Walter Pincus I’m thrilled to welcome back Tony Award - Dr. Paul Carter Eden Rafshoon Support 19 winning director Doug Hughes, who directed a Chelsea Clinton Ex-Officio Emily Malino Scheuer* Dr. Mark Epstein Chris Jennings, Lady Sheinwald For STC 26 powerful production of The Little Foxes for STC Andrew C. Florance Managing Director Mrs. Louis Sullivan in 2002. I am also thrilled to welcome Emmy Miles Gilburne Daniel W. Toohey STC Staff 30 ® Barbara Harman Sarah Valente Award -winning actor Richard Schiff, who is John R. Hauge Lady Wright Audience Services 31 making his STC mainstage debut. He comes Stephen A. Hopkins to us straight from Broadway, where he has Lawrence A. Hough * Deceased been performing in Glengarry Glen Ross. Along with Doug and Richard, we have assembled a creative team of some of the American theatre’s best artists. In the remainder of our 2012–2013 Season I will be directing Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein in the Hero/Traitor Repertory alongside Don’t Miss Out! Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, which will be directed by David Muse, former STC Associate Director and current Artistic Director of The “An evening of high farce before the high court” Studio Theatre. In the spring, Rebecca Bayla Legal Times Taichman returns with what will be a beautiful production of The Winter’s Tale. We hope to The Shakespeare Theatre share these stories with you in our theatres. Company’s Annual Dinner and Warm regards, Mock Trial Monday, May 13, 2013 Michael Kahn 5:30 p.m. Dinner Artistic Director 7:30 p.m. Argument Shakespeare Theatre Company Exclusive Dinner and Trial tickets are available now. Call 202.547.3230 ext. 2330. Want Trial tickets before they go on sale to the public? Join Shakespeare Stars as a Contributor with a gift of $150 and enjoy Mock Trial pre-sale and additional benefits like Meet The Cast and more! For more information visit ShakespeareTheatre.org/Support or call 202.547.1122, option 7. 2 3 Photos by Scott Suchman Scott by Photos Begins March 28. Part of the Clarice Smith Repertory Series New Commission Support for Wallenstein: Production Support Restaurant Partner Restaurant Partner The Beech Street Foundation for Wallenstein: for Wallenstein: for Coriolanus: Repertory Series Sponsor: The Robert H. Smith Family Foundation the ShakespeareCast &to Crew Richard TheatreCongratulations of Schiff, Company! the The Nation’s Premier Public Relations, Communications, and Strategy Firm Specializing in Radio and Television Hughie, and STRATEGIES Radio • Television • Social Celebrating 18 Years of Achievement as the Broadcast PR Industry Leader With Our New Name! New • Radio and Satellite Television Tours With Strategic, Targeted, & High-Level Results • Other Services: Actualities, Advertising, Audio News Releases, Audio & Video Spain. 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But nowhere else does I mean, the whole goddamned racket. I mean he present the two side-by-side and with Chamber Sonata life.” It’s one of Erie’s few lines that receives a such elegant simplicity. Significantly, this is response from Charlie Hughes, who cheerfully also the only one of O’Neill’s plays in which agrees with him. he suggests that the life-lie, the pipe dream In September 1940 Eugene O’Neill finished the during the halcyon era of 1928, Hughie consists that gets us through the “whole goddamned O’Neill’s stage directions are unusually first manuscript of Long Day’s Journey into Night. of one scene, requires only two actors and takes racket” of life, can be a positive thing as well detailed in this play, even for the typically On July 22, 1941, he gave the final draft to his a relatively short time to perform. Through the as a tragic one. A few months after completing novelistic and prolix O’Neill. Through them third wife, Carlotta, on the twelfth anniversary dialogue of its two characters, punctuated by Hughie, on October 28, 1941, O’Neill began he creates a vivid series of dream tableaux of their marriage. Dedicating the play to her, brief silent interludes, O’Neill skillfully and working on A Moon for the Misbegotten, a play for Charlie Hughes, commingling with the he signed it, a “play of old sorrow, written in economically draws three brief but surprisingly that similarly explores the dreams of a life urban jangle of Broadway and creating a tears and blood.” detailed life stories. The play is a kind of remembered and the realities of a life soon dramatic snapshot, a moment frozen in time. fog of unreality that envelops the kitchen- This was almost literally true. Toward the end over. But it is in Hughie where O’Neill most fully But it is an image that deepens the longer we sink realism of the hotel lobby. The question of his life, O’Neill developed a severe tremor suggests an alternative to his tragic view of life, look at it. What starts out seeming like a simple of how to illustrate these private thoughts in his writing hand, making the composition looking beyond tragedy, beyond mourning, to character study emerges as a dying playwright’s in Hughie is one that has bedeviled theatre of his plays—he could only write long-hand— something that could be called hope. ruminations on life and death, dreams and practitioners since its premiere in 1958 in slow and painful. One of O’Neill’s heroes, reality. And form follows content. As if in Stockholm. O’Neill once said that it would the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, response to O’Neill’s thematic interests in deeper take “tremendous imagination” to stage the Drew Lichtenberg, Literary Associate similarly had a blood-thinning disorder at the truths, the play’s seemingly straightforward end of his life, causing his fingers to literally setting and time scheme gives way to a bleed onto the page of the manuscript, pooling permanent midnight. The stage becomes a with the black ink of the words below. Like metaphysical landscape, and the audience is Strindberg, and like Beethoven who worked asked to confront deep underlying truths. arduously to complete his Ninth Symphony after going deaf, O’Neill was driven on by The life stories are those of “Erie” Smith, the the artist’s ferocious desire to create, even as night clerk Charlie Hughes and Hughie, the his body was decaying. And like Strindberg’s title character. All are purgatorial figures, WILL ON THE HILL May 6, 2013 and Beethoven’s final works, O’Neill’s late souls lost in their own worlds of illusion. Erie, Join us for one of Washington’s most anticipated spring events— Will on the plays are works of visionary power and soul- a small-time Broadway gambler, has spent the Hill! This Shakespeare Theatre Company annual benefit welcomes Senators, baring courage. They summon ghosts in an best years of his life in the play’s hotel lobby, Representatives and distinguished Washington insiders to the stage to atmosphere of American myth, depicting regaling the night-clerk Hughie with tall tales perform scenes from Shakespeare with a Capitol twist. Infused with comedic dreamlike scenes inspired by O’Neill’s past life, of his prowess at the races. But Hughie has references to contemporary politics, this distinctive and fun-filled evening is sure to leave you in stitches. Will on the Hill pays tribute to the unique so detailed that one can scarcely believe they died recently, and Erie hasn’t won a bet since.