First look rehearsal images are released for the first London production in 40 years of Lanford Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Talley’s Folly.
Part of the New York Voices 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.
Talley’s Folly is at the Cockpit Theatre 13th – 29th October 2022
