Gray's Middle Classes Closes at Williamstown, Aug. 6 | Playbill

Related Articles
News Gray's Middle Classes Closes at Williamstown, Aug. 6 The American premiere of Simon Gray's The Late Middle Classes, which began at the Williamstown Theatre Festival on July 26, will end its run on Aug. 6. Featured in the cast aree Daniel Gerroll, as a character named Holly, and Daniel's son Benjamin Gerroll, fittingly as Young Holly.

The American premiere of Simon Gray's The Late Middle Classes, which began at the Williamstown Theatre Festival on July 26, will end its run on Aug. 6. Featured in the cast aree Daniel Gerroll, as a character named Holly, and Daniel's son Benjamin Gerroll, fittingly as Young Holly.

Daniel Gerroll is fast becoming the new Brian Murray of New York -- that is, a ubiquitous actor who is never not working and manages to cram in three to four assignments a season. Over the last twelve months, he has acted in An Experiment with an Air Pump, at Manhattan Theatre Club, The Messenger, at the Rattlestick Theatre, What You Get and What You Expect, at New York Theatre Workshop, and, just a couple weeks ago, The Constant Wife, at Westport Country Theatre.

Benjamin Gerroll will be making his WTF debut in Classes. At the Buckley school in NYC, however, he has been seen at Toad in The Wind in the Willows and Isaac the square dance caller in The Devil and Daniel Webster.

Gerroll is not a stranger to the work of Britisher Simon Gray. Long memoried New York theatregoers may remember him spitting out vitriol whilst standing in his underwear as the egotistic, sybaritic publisher in Gray's The Holy Terror.

The Late Middle Classes is set in the 1950s in England, where Young Holly "navigates a troublesome relationship with his piano teacher amidst his parents' attempts to invigorate their drab daily existence." The play caused a bit of a furor in London last year, when it was beaten to a West End slot by the short-lived musical Boyband, provoking a vitriolic attack on commercial theatre by director Harold Pinter. It later won the award for Best New Play in the 1999 Barclays Theatre Awards. Classes is attracting attention from New York producers, according to sources close to the production, and may see life in Manhattan sometime this coming season.

Also in the WTF cast are Tom Bloom, Lisa Harrow and Lucille Patton. Roger Rees (Arms and the Man) directs.

*

The Williamstown Theatre Festival has assembled a group of rising New York stage talents to populate its Aug. 16-27 revival of Moss Hart's Light Up the Sky. Leading the cast are Frank Wood, Jessica Hecht, Enid Graham and Angelina Phillips.

Phillips and Graham have worked together before, in CSC Repertory's Off Broadway revival of Look Back in Anger last fall. Phillips starred in WTF's All My Sons several seasons back, a production which traveled to New York and made her name in theatre circles. Graham was first noticed in the Broadway staging of Honour. She has since appeared Off-Broadway in Turn of the Screw at Primary Stages.

Frank Wood won a Tony for her performance as a feckless trumpet play in Side Man by Warren Leight (whose Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine was seen at Williamstown last summer). Hecht, meanwhile, is a darling of Gotham critics, winning plaudits for her appearances in The Last Night of Ballyhoo, Stop Kiss, Plunge and Lobster Alice.

Thrown into this mix is Eric Stoltz, a veteran film actor ("Pulp Fiction") who occasionally graces stages in New York (Three Sisters) and Williamstown (The Glass Menagerie).

Hart's backstage comedy will be directed by Christopher Ashley, the helmsman behind such shows as Jeffrey and As Thousands Cheer.

*

Spanning the centuries in the Williamstown Theatre Festival production of Thornton Wilder's Skin of Our Teeth are Kristine Nielsen, Marian Seldes, Bill Smitrovich and Kali Rocha. The play began Aug. 2 and runs through Aug.13 on the Main Stage and is directed by Darko Tresnjak.

Nielsen and Smitrovich play Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus, the heros of Wilder's fantastical, slightly absurb fable of human existence and endurance. Nielsen should be used to odd theatrical worlds by now, veteran, as she is, of Julie Taymor's The Green Bird and Christopher Durang's Betty's Summer Vacation. Smitrovich is more a by-the book type, having played countless generals, captains and colonels in such films as "Independence Day," "Air Force One" and "Fail Safe."

Seldes plays the Fortune Teller. After many years of seldom being seen on the stage, Seldes has been an omnipresence of late, rarely seen off the stage. In the past year, she's gone from Ring Round the Moon on Broadway to Dear Liar and The Torch Bearers Off Broadway.

Rocha plays eternal seductress Sabina, having just finished a run as a different sort of scarlet women in The Constant Wife at Westport Country Playhouse, under the direction of Joanne Woodward.

-- By Robert Simonson

 
RELATED:
Today’s Most Popular News:
 X

Blocking belongs
on the stage,
not on websites.

Our website is made possible by
displaying online advertisements to our visitors.

Please consider supporting us by
whitelisting playbill.com with your ad blocker.
Thank you!