The Woman In Black, the mystery play by Stephen Mallatratt which has run for thirteen years in London, will open the 2001 season at the Old Globe Theatre on Feb. 15. Directed by Patrick Garland, the West Coast production of the play is scheduled to transfer later this year to New York City for an Off- Broadway run.

The Woman In Black stars Keith Baxter as Arthur Kipps and Jared Reed as The Actor. The play tells the story of Kipps, a middleaged solicitor, who hires a theatre and the services of a professional actor to help him reenact—and hopefully exorcize—a ghostly event which occurred earlier in his life. Complications unfold as the two men shift between their conversations in the present and their enactment of it in the past. The actor plays the young Kipps, sent north by his London firm to settle the estate of an elderly recluse, the late Mrs. Drablow, at whose marshland house Kipps encounters the woman in black. This specter, seeking revenge for the death of her child, attaches herself to Kipps, unleashing a macabre sequence of events which culminates in a chilling twist in the play's final moments.

Among Baxter's Broadway credits are Sleuth, A Man For All Seasons and A Meeting By the River. Reed appeared at the Globe in Stephen Wadsworth's acclaimed production of As You Like It. Garland is the former artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre.

Old Globe Theatre is located at Balboa Park. For tickets and information call (619) 239-2255.

— By Willard Manus
Southern California Correspondent