Enid Graham and Angelina Phillips, two young actresses who have garnered attention in New York in recent seasons, have been added to the cast of Classic Stage Company's upcoming revival of Look Back in Anger. The John Osborne play will run Oct. 6-Nov. 14, with an Oct. 17 opening.
Graham, who will play Alison Porter to Reg Rogers' Jimmy Porter, netted a Tony nomination for her performance last season in Honour. Her Off- Broadway credits include As Bees in Honey Drown and The Turn of the Screw, opposite Rocco Sisto at Primary Stages.
Phillips, who formerly used the name "Angie Phillips," first received widespread notice in the Roundabout Theatre Company's All My Sons, a production that transferred from the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Phillips recently returned to Williamstown to perform in the Gwyneth Paltrow As You Like It. She will play Helena Charles.
Rounding out the cast is James Joseph O'Neill, as Cliff Lewis. Rogers credits include Proposals, Holiday (Tony and Drama Desk nominations), The Moliere Comedies and Four Dogs and a Bone. Regional credits include Cellini in John Patrick Shanley's Cellini at New York Stage and Film, Dealers Choice at the Long Wharf (Connecticut Critics Circle nomination) as well as work at Yale Rep, Baltimore Center Stage, Guthrie, Williamstown, Old Globe and the Eisenhower Theatre. He is currently starring in Richard Greenberg's Hurrah at Last.
Osborne's Anger is a conventionally structured five-character play that focuses on Jimmy Porter and his dissatisfactions with the world, with a French absurdist "life is meaningless" bent. Throughout the play, Jimmy baits his upper-class wife Alison into arguments. Other plays by Osborne, the chairman of the board of London's "Angry Young Men" playwriting group of the 1950s, include 1957's The Entertainer, and 1965's Inadmissible Evidence. *
Next up, Edelstein will direct a co-production, with Naked Angels, of Erin Cressida Wilson's Hurricane, Dec. 3-19. Hurricane tells the story of five seemingly disconnected people, who share their world views, loves, and personalities, each reflecting the Woman's voice. In Utah, a female resident of the town of Hurricane discusses the Bomb and how the U.S. government has threatened her town and livelihood. Meanwhile, in New York, a couple in the fashion industry discuss their relationship; a politically correct actor enjoys pinching all the beautiful women he meets; and an ex-POW endures a journalist's painful questions about maintaining sanity in insane circumstances. Cressida Wilson's The Erotica Project (w/John Gould Rubin) has been seen in New York at The Public Theatre's Joe's Pub and at HERE. Wilson is a professor of Playwriting at Duke University. Her plays include: My Girl Is in Front, Cross-Dressing in the Depression, Soiled Eyes of the Ghost, and Dakota's Belly, Wyoming.
Third in the line-up will be a rare revival of Ben Jonson's 1610 play, The Alchemist, directed by CSC artistic director Barry Edelstein, Feb. 3-March 12, 2000, with a Feb. 13 opening. A comedy, Alchemist tells of two con-men who burst into a rich man's house to capitalize on potential greed.
The American premiere of Luigi Pirandello's Naked will take the CSC stage, March 30-April 30, 2000, opening April 9, in a new version by Nicholas Wright (Mrs. Klein). In Naked, a nanny is tormented by the death of a child under her care. Seeking refuge from the press, her ex-boyfriend and the child's father, she befriends a famous novelist who offers her shelter in exchange for her account of the story.
For tickets or more information on CSC's season, call (212) 677-4210.
--By Robert Simonson and Sean McGrath
