The cast has been announced for the first London production in 40 years of Lanford Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Talley’s Folly.
Part of the programming season at Marylebone’s Cockpit theatre, this timely revival sees USA-based Burning Coal Theatre Company join forces with The Cockpit to give today’s audience a visceral reminder that love and connection are the timeless human qualities that can see us through hard times.
Hailing from Raleigh, North Carolina, the Artistic Director of Burning Coal Theatre Company Jerome Davis (Dark Vanilla Jungle; The Iron Curtain Trilogy, The Cockpit) takes on the role of Matt Friedman, a Jewish Lithuanian refugee. Brooklyn-based Kelly Pekar (The Threepenny Opera, Off Broadway; Three Sisters, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park) makes her debut with Burning Coal as Sally Talley, a lonely farm girl from a conservative Protestant family. The play is the story of how this unlikely pair come together, for better or for worse, in a decaying boat house on a riverbank in Missouri.
The greatest playwright you’ve never heard of; Lanford Wilson occupies a premier position as a hugely influential and prolific member of New York’s off-Broadway theatre scene of the late 1950s. Wilson, along with Sam Shepard, Edward Albee and David Mamet were the pioneers of American Theatre whose ‘lyric naturalism’ style, developed in Greenwich Village, went on to exert a global influence on the stage.
It’s 1944 and the chaos of war means societies fracture, traditional expectations are collapsing, and people’s lives are the collateral damage. For Sally and Matt, caught together in a fading Missouri idyll and from wildly different backgrounds, there is hurt and anger. They are worlds apart but, as Wilson’s play suggests, anger plus hope can equal change. Now, as then, upheaval, division and disquiet stalk continents and damaged and displaced people must find each other – no matter how difficult those connections might seem.
Directed by John Gulley, a professor of theatre studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilson’s one-act play deals with the heroic resilience of the American heartland folks he grew up with. Identifying the struggle, dignity and authenticity of those living in the ‘flyover states’, Wilson examines that most American of subjects – immigration – through the relationship between a Jewish refugee and a lonely, embittered and brilliant outcast.
This profoundly serious but also beautiful and funny two-hander is part of a trilogy of plays that include Fifth of July, set 31 years later on the same Missouri estate as Talley’s Folly and Talley & Son. Wilson had planned to write as many as nine plays about the Talleys of Lebanon, Missouri prior to his untimely death in 2011 at the age of 74. The original production of Talley’s Folly played on Broadway and starred Judd Hirsh and Trish Hawkins. Its only other London production, in 1983, was presented at the Lyric Hammersmith and starred Haley Mills and Jonathan Pryce.
Talley’s Folly is at The Cockpit Thursday 13th October – Saturday 29th October 2022.
