After its summertime world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse, Charles L. Mee's Wintertime will travel to Connecticut's Long Wharf Theatre for a run on the mainstage Oct. 2-Nov. 3. This production, which features members of the La Jolla cast and director Les Waters (Big Love), opens Oct. 9.
Wintertime is fashioned like a farce — three couples accidentally run into each other at a secluded country inn, where more than one partner was planning on taking the air and doing a little cheating on the sly. Wife Maria was hoping to meet her lover, while her husband Frank has brought along a boyfriend and her son Jonathan has invited his fiancee Ariel in order to propose to her. Pour into the mix a lesbian couple, a salesman-cum-deacon and a doctor who is sleeping with one of the three and comic chaos ensues.
Wintertime was orginally written as a companion piece to Summertime. The latter was set in and around a garden terrace, where the characters wandered in and out of a series of scenes, as each expresses and discovers his or her relations to the others while facing questions of sexual identity, beauty and other cultural norms.
Mee, a playwright, historian and editor, also penned Another Person is a Foreign Country, Trojan Women: A Love Story, The Berlin Circle (directed by Tina Landau), and Orestes. His recent Vienna: Lusthaus extended at New York Theatre Workshop, closing July 21.
Wintertime stars Obie Award winner Randy Danson (Mad Forest, NYSF's A Winter's Tale) as Maria, Francois Giroday as her lover, Nicholas Hormann (Making It) as her husband Frank, Tom Nelis as his lover and Lola Pashalinski (Broadway's Fortune's Fool) and Lauren Klein (Big Love) as the lesbian couple Hilda and Bertha. Michi Barall, who played Dr. Jacqueline Benoit in La Jolla, plays the fiancee Ariel at Long Wharf. Aimee Guillot is Dr. Benoit with other new cast members Mark Saturno as Jonathan and Mark Alan Gordon as Bob, the salesman. Designing the show are Anne Smart (sets), Christal Weatherly (costumes) and Robert Wierzel (lighting).
Single tickets to Long Wharf productions are $45-$15. For reservations and information, call (203) 787-4282. The Long Wharf Theatre is on the web at http://www.longwharf.org.
— By Christine Ehren
