Elizabeth Ashley and Andrew McCarthy star in Tennessee Williams' classic The Glass Menagerie at American Repertory Theatre's Loeb Drama Center June 19 July 11. The Hartford Stage production will open June 20 at the Cambridge, Massachusetts venue. Recently seen on Broadway in Gore Vidal's The Best Man, Ashley will portray the matriarch of the Wingfield family surviving in 1939 St. Louis. One of Broadway's Side Man Clifford replacements, McCarthy will play her son who has unwillingly become the breadwinner of the family. Wrong Mountain's Anne Dudek and The Miser's Willis Sparks will fill out the cast as the sheltered daughter and her gentleman caller.

Tony Award-winning Ashley with her prize for her role in Take Her, She's Mine opposite Art Carney. Her other credits include Barefoot in the Park, The Skin of Our Teeth, Legend, Hide and Seek, and Agnes of God. McCarthy has also seen the stage in the Hartford productions of Horton Foote's The Death of Papa and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. Film fans will recognize him from "Pretty in Pink," "Mannequin," and "Weekend at Bernie's."

Hartford Stage artistic director Michael Wilson helms the play which ran in Connecticut at Hartford Stage's homebase April 5 to May 12. Set design is handled by Tony Straiges, costume design is by Judith Dolan, lighting design is by Howell Binkley, and John Gromada provides the production with original music and sound design.

For tickets to Hartford Stage's The Glass Menagerie at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street, in Cambridge,MA, call (617) 547-8300 or visit their website at http://www.amrep.org.

— by Ernio Hernandez