David Warren, who directed the recent much-applauded revival of Holiday at Circle in the Square, is hardly having one himself these days. Far from it.
His revival of Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke is starting to smolder at the Roundabout Theatre, and he's fit to be tied he'll be so busy. In fact, Fit To Be Tied is the name of the new Nicky Silver play he'll do next at Playwrights Horizons. In fact, the twain will meet and overlap in a few weeks.
"At one point," he says, "I'll be rehearsing by day and previewing by night."
Summer and Smoke begins rehearsals July 23. The drama, which flopped on Broadway in 1948 and didn't really click till it was revived Off-Broadway in 1952 with Geraldine Page, begins performances Aug. 16 and will open Sept. 5.
In Williams' romantic parable about the struggle of body versus soul, Mary McDonnell stars as the soulful Miss Alma (Spanish for soul), a sexually repressed Southern spinster, and Harry Hamlin is the doctor's grown boy-next-door. Ken Jenkins (Big Dan's dad) and Roberta Maxwell play her parents. Adam LeFevre and Timothy Todd Weaks are the radically different other men in her life--a chaste swain and a seductive stranger. Also featured are Celia (Dead Man Walking) Weston, Lisa Leguillou, Nathalie Paulding and James Pritchett.
Fit To Be Tied, the latest from the kinetically comical author of "The Food Chain," begins rehearsing Aug. 27 for its first preview on Sept. 20. The play will open Oct. 13. "It's about people who are afraid and have to become free of their psychic prisons," says Warren. "It's everybody's story, really."
Synopsis-wise, that breaks down into: "An unlikely but delightful menage a trois is created with Arlock (T. Scott Cunningham), who has inherited his wealthy father's entire fortune, takes in his madcap mother (Jean Smart) and a handsome angel from the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Extravaganza (Matt Keesler)." Dick Latessa, last seen as the coach in Damn Yankees, co-stars.
Smart starred for five years as Charlene Frazier Stillfield on TV's "Designing Women." Cunningham came to prominence in Silver's first hit, Pteradactyls. Keeslar co-starred in the recent Albert Finney film, Run of the Country.
