Sam Trammell, the young star who made a splash a couple seasons back in Lincoln Center Theater's production of O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!, will star opposite Elizabeth Ashley in the upcoming Off-Broadway show, As Memory Serves, set to move into the Promenade Theatre Nov. 26 for a Dec. 8 opening.
Trammell will play the son of the Ashley character, a wholesome, Mary Tyler-Moore-Florence-Henderson-type television star desperate to revive her flagging career. All goes to pieces, however, when her son makes some ill-considered jokes which then take on a media life of their own.
Trammell won a Theatre World Award and a Clarence Derwent Award for Ah, Wilderness!.
Ashley is best known for several Broadway turns in the plays of Tennessee Williams, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer. She recently appeared at Washington, D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre in Sweet Bird of Youth.
Also in the cast are Tony Campisi (Frankie and Johnny in the Claire De Lune), Lynda Gravatt, Ron Mathews, Marilyn Sokol (Conversations with my Father), Melanie Vesey and Jeff Whitty (Gross Indecency). If Memory Serves is written by Jonathan Tolins, the author of Twilight of the Golds. Leonard Foglia will direct. Director Foglia staged the Broadway production of Terrence McNally's Master Class. He also directed the Pasadena mounting of If Memory Serves, which starred Brooke Adams and David Groh.
Rehearsals for Memory began Oct. 26.
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Elizabeth Ashley lost nearly everything she owned Oct. 14 when a devastating fire gutted her Manhattan apartment. The fire struck Ashley's Union Square home after she stepped out for breakfast around 9 AM. A cigarette she had tossed into the kitchen wastebasket ignited. The resulting conflagration was fought by 190 firefighters for 90 minutes, according to The Daily News.
Ashley's 1962 Tony Award for Take Her, She's Mine was reportedly one of the items lost in the blaze. According to a spokesman for the Tonys, if the trophy was indeed lost, it will be replaced by the organization.
-- By Robert Simonson
