The cast has been announced for the first London production in 40 years of Lanford Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Talley’s Folly. Part of the New York Voices programming season at Marylebone’s Cockpit theatre, this timely revival sees USA-based Burning Coal Theatre Company join forces with The Cockpit to give today’s audience a visceral reminder that love and connection are the timeless human qualities that can see us through hard times.
Hailing from Raleigh, North Carolina, the Artistic Director of Burning Coal Theatre Company Jerome Davis (Dark Vanilla Jungle; The Iron Curtain Trilogy, The Cockpit) takes on the role of Matt Friedman, a Jewish Lithuanian refugee. Brooklyn-based Kelly Pekar (The Threepenny Opera, Off Broadway; Three Sisters, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park) makes her debut with Burning Coal as Sally Talley, a lonely farm girl from a conservative Protestant family. The play is the story of how this unlikely pair come together, for better or for worse, in a decaying boat house on a riverbank in Missouri.
The greatest playwright you’ve never heard of; Lanford Wilson occupies a premier position as a hugely influential and prolific member of New York’s off-Broadway theatre scene of the late 1950s. Wilson, along with Sam Shepard, Edward Albee and David Mamet were the pioneers of American Theatre whose ‘lyric naturalism’ style, developed in Greenwich Village, went on to exert a global influence on the stage.
It’s 1944 and the chaos of war means societies fracture, traditional expectations are collapsing, and people’s lives are the collateral damage. For Sally and Matt, caught together in a fading Missouri idyll and from wildly different backgrounds, there is hurt and anger. They are worlds apart but, as Wilson’s play suggests, anger plus hope can equal change. Now, as then, upheaval, division and disquiet stalk continents and damaged and displaced people must find each other – no matter how difficult those connections might seem.
Directed by John Gulley, a professor of theatre studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilson’s one-act play deals with the heroic resilience of the American heartland folks he grew up with. Identifying the struggle, dignity and authenticity of those living in the ‘flyover states’, Wilson examines that most American of subjects – immigration – through the relationship between a Jewish refugee and a lonely, embittered and brilliant outcast.
This profoundly serious but also beautiful and funny two-hander is part of a trilogy of plays that include Fifth of July, set 31 years later on the same Missouri estate as Talley’s Folly and Talley & Son. Wilson had planned to write as many as nine plays about the Talleys of Lebanon, Missouri prior to his untimely death in 2011 at the age of 74. The original production of Talley’s Folly played on Broadway and starred Judd Hirsh and Trish Hawkins. Its only other London production, in 1983, was presented at the Lyric Hammersmith and starred Haley Mills and Jonathan Pryce.
Notes to Editors
Show Talley’s Folly
Dates Thursday 13th – Saturday 29th October, 7.30pm
Matinées 16th, 23rd, 29th, 2pm
Running Time 97 minutes without an interval
Location The Cockpit, Gateforth Street, London NW8 8EH
How to get there The nearest train stations are Edgware Road (Hammersmith and City, District, Circle, Bakerloo) and Marylebone (Bakerloo and main line). Buses stopping nearby are 6, 16, 18, 98, 139, 189, 332, 414.
Box Office Tickets from £12 available at www.thecockpit.org.uk or on 020 7258 2925
Writer Lanford Wilson
Director John Gulley
Sound and music Juan Isler
Lighting designer Matthew Adelson
Scenery Joel Soren
Set construction Duncan Henderson
Costume designer Neena Rai
Dialect Coach Rebecca Bossen
Dramaturg Erik Kildow
Stage Manager Courtney Pisano
Producers Burning Coal Theatre
Cast
Matt Friedman Jerome Davis
Sally Talley Kelly Pekar
Social @burningcoaltc | @cockpittheatre
Website www.burningcoal.org
https://www.thecockpit.org.uk/NewYorkVoices
Lanford Wilson
Originally from Lebanon, Missouri, Lanford Wilson is one of Great American Playwrights. He is best known as one of the originators of “lyric naturalism”, which became the ’house style’ at the legendary Circle Rep in the West Village, where first productions of Wilson’s great body of work (Fifth of July, Burn This, Lemon Sky, Book of Days, The Gingham Dog, Balm in Gilead, The Hot L Baltimore, Redwood Curtain, The Mound Builders, The Rimers of Eldritch and numerous others) was often seen. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for Talley’s Folly, his two-hander about a mismatched pair of societal misfits who come together one extraordinary summer evening in the backwoods near Lebanon, Missouri in the dying days of World War II.
Burning Coal Theatre
A quarter-century after it began as a small, independent not for profit theatre in Raleigh, NC, Burning Coal has grown into one of the most important and influential theatres in the Southeastern United States. Their 2014 world premiere productions of David Edgar’s The Iron Curtain Trilogy travelled to London’s The Cockpit, where it received a 4-star review from Michael Billington, along with five other 4-star reviews. It followed again in 2017 with a revival of Philip Ridley’s solo Dark Vanilla Jungle at the Camden Fringe Festival. Talley’s Folly Director John Gulley is an associate professor of theatre at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. As a freelance professional director, John has directed Off-Broadway and for a number of regional professional theatres. Professional credits include the world premiere of Trophies at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City, The Trip to Bountiful, starring Ellen Burstyn, at TheatreFest in Montclair, NJ (and later at the Phoenix Theatre, SUNY/Purchase), and The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the NC Shakespeare Festival. From 1983-1991, John was the Resident Director for the Asolo Theatre Company in Sarasota, Florida. While there he directed over thirty productions and taught at the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Professional Actor Training.
The Cockpit Theatre
The Cockpit is a fringe theatre in Marylebone, London and home to the Theatre of Ideas and disruptive panache. Turning over more titles per year than any other London theatre, their focus is on ensemble working and providing a voice of the times through theatre, and are committed to equality, diversity and inclusion in their staffing, programming and artistic participation. Alongside theatre and dance they operate year-round contemporary jazz and opera programmes, plus London’s only multi-lingual theatre festival, Voila, every November. The Cockpit is also home to the Theatre Maker brand of short courses for early career professional development and host London’s longest running scratch night Theatre in the Pound. Designed by Edward Mendelsohn, The Cockpit was constructed by 1970 by the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) and is notable as London’s first purpose-built theatre in the round since the Great Fire of London. When ILEA was disbanded in 1990, ownership was transferred to the London Borough of Westminster, who made it part of the City of Westminster College. It remains one of a few purpose-built theatre training venues in the capital and is still owned and operated by the City of Westminster College.
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Francesca Lynn, Chloé Nelkin Consulting
E: francesca@chloenelkinconsulting.com, T: 020 3627 2960
